


Collateral Silence

by thesearchforbluejello



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: 86 percent unbeta'ed, Aliases, Angst, F/M, Whump, all the listed characters appear be patient, but also some graphic scenes mind the tags, but it's Whumptober now so it's even more appropriate because there is lots of, let's play spot-the-cassianappreciationweek-prompts they're all there, plus a bonus OC, some non-graphic torture, this was started for Cassian appreciation week but I didn't finish it until September, when I say angst I do not jest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-05 11:06:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 24,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16366706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesearchforbluejello/pseuds/thesearchforbluejello
Summary: "The pragmatic side of him instilled by years of survival is telling him that he needs to rest while he has the chance. It's a better way to pretend, he supposes. To pretend that he's not listening to each and every breath she takes, every shift of her body against the floor, every breath that's halfway between a sigh and a gasp as her mind registers the pain even through the deep of unconsciousness.He pretends that each one of those sounds whispered into the silence, evaporating into the ship's ambient hum, doesn't drive the star-hot points of guilt deeper into his chest."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be updating a chapter per day so they're all up before I move. Drop me a line to let me know what you think!

Cassian hauls Jyn to her feet with a hand fisted in her jacket. She stumbles beside him as she regains her footing, throwing an arm up over her head as another secondary blast sounds behind them, muted and seemingly distant through the hazy ringing in their ears. Sheets of ash and dust slant down towards them from the bulbous pillar billowing into the sky above the compound. The smell of the fire burns caustic in his nose.

Bad parts.

He knows it must've been. His head is swimming with shock and adrenaline but it’s an obvious conclusion. There was something wrong with one of the components they'd used; such a simple problem, but almost responsible for killing them before they could slip away undetected. Now they're fleeing the bomb site and the frantic crowd that's swelling around them is their only advantage. 

Cassian's back is screaming. He'd landed hard in the concussion of the blast, shoulder first, the stress of the impact traveling violently down his spine. But that, at the moment, is the least of their problems.

Their ship is at the other end of the city and 'troopers are beginning to flood the streets in droves. Most are running right towards the facility that's now consumed in a cloud of fire; the rest, though, the rest are stopping sentients in their frantic flight away, binding some and hauling them out of the street. Cassian pulls Jyn roughly backward against his chest. "You don't know me," he hisses in her ear. He pushes her toward one of the side streets clogged with fleeing bodies. She doesn't look back, instead letting herself be carried away by the crowd.

Cassian does the same, struggling to keep his footing in the press of bodies, moving with the flow of the crowd like he's panicked and lost. He can only hope it's enough. He can only hope no one saw them.

He almost makes it to the end of the street when he sees the 'troopers.

It's a roadblock, 'troopers filtering those fleeing, arresting some and detaining them at the edges of the intersection. 

"Stop," a filtered voice says and a gloved hand closes around Cassian's arm. He looks up into the mask and allows panic to show on his face. He goes entirely still, false fear making him stiff. "Detain this one."

More gloved hands pull at his arms, clamping binders around his wrists behind his back. His instincts tell him to fight but he quashes the impulse. He'd never escape alive.

"Please," he says instead. "Please, I've done nothing. We have to flee! Please!" he pleads, forcing his accent into something sharper that could be from any number of worlds. The 'troopers don't respond. They force him to his knees by a stuccoed wall. The impact of the hard street pavers makes his back scream a little more. Nausea surges in him, gripping his throat. He tries to breathe it away as the 'troopers frisk him, removing vibroblades from his boots, his wrists, his belt. He's got one in his collar too, but they're so rushed that they miss it. They toss the blades in a pile with the blasters and other weapons they've removed from their prisoners. Cassian looks around as he tries to clear the haze of adrenaline from his mind. There are maybe thirty people bound along the roadblock, all human.

Someone cries out and most of them turn their heads to look. Two 'troopers are wrestling with someone at the end of one of the streets. The cry was distinctly feminine, but he can't see the woman behind the dusty white armor. Cassian hopes with a cold sort of dread that it's not Jyn. 

"Let me go!" she cries, and the words are sharper than her real accent, laced with an uncharacteristic fear, but he would know the sound of her voice anywhere.

Of course it's her.

She hardly makes a sound against the pavers when the 'troopers drop her. Or, he knows, when she _lets_ the 'troopers drop her, for the same reason he had. Once she's bound and her weapons are removed, they drag her to the side of the road and let her drop again. He only catches glimpses of her as his eyes roam the bound Humans, forcing himself to only look at her for as long as he looks at any of the others.

He sees her panting against the street the first time his eyes land on her. The next time, he sees that her eyes are tightly shut and her face is white. Then he sees the little splotches on her jacket, dark blooms the size of his fingertips.

He watches the 'troopers, waiting for her to move, keeping her just at the edge of his field of vision. His knees are aching against the stone and a tight sort of burning has settled into his back, reaching hotly into his pelvis with the angle he's forced to remain kneeling. The 'troopers detain another man.

Jyn hasn't moved and he wonders exactly what game she's planning to play. He forces his muddy thoughts into some semblance of order to assess the situation. The splotches on her jacket haven't grown, so he knows she's not in danger of bleeding to death-- yet. Either way, he curses himself for not having noticed she was injured in the blast. Rationally, he knows that he'd been too dazed and preoccupied with getting them away before they were caught to notice anything beside the fact that she was alive and able to walk. Through the confusion and adrenaline, he wonders if she'd even noticed herself.

The 'troopers keep them until the crowd has thinned to a trickle of movement, everyone else having fled and hid indoors. The initial panic has spent itself quickly; the suns are still high overhead and sweat is bleeding cold trails down his back and chest.

"To your feet," one of the 'troopers commands, and some of the Humans struggle to stand. Cassian's back is so tight he can barely shift his hips. At the edge of the intersection, Jyn rolls to her stomach but makes no further move to stand. 

"Get up," another trooper says, beside him.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, my legs are numb, I'm sorry." The 'trooper hauls Cassian to his feet by his jacket and his legs buckle. The 'trooper doesn't let go until he's managed to lock his knees. "Thank you," he says softly, looking at the ground. The 'trooper moves away.

Cassian looks around at the Humans being herded down the street. Men and women both, all dark haired. He realizes then that this is all the 'troopers know. Someone must have spotted them, reported a vague description when the bomb had gone off. This will work in their favor, he knows; they can't escape now without being killed, but it will take time for the Empire to run their records. He knows their aliases won't stand up to the sort of intense examination they’ll likely be subjected to, since this mission was never supposed to put them under that sort of scrutiny, so it leaves them a small window in which they can come up with a plan. If they stay long enough for their faces to be transmitted through the Empire, they'll both be burned. Even if they manage to escape, and that’s a sizeable uncertanty, the rebellion would ground them from missions like this, missions they normally excelled at. He doesn't want to think about that outcome, not yet.

Especially because it’s perhaps the least of their worries now, because Cassian can do nothing more than hope that the Empire had no records of them already.

A 'trooper nudges Jyn with his boot and Cassian forces the boiling anger that rises at the action down to a compressed simmer. Two of them haul her to her feet and she makes a strangled sound. There's a gauzy smear on the street pavers beneath her from her blood-damp jacket.

They march them down the street to an Imperial-use landing pad where a ground-to-ship transport is waiting. Cassian hides the stiffness of his gait as best he can; on the off chance their captors would bother providing medical attention for something not life-threatening, he doesn’t want to attract attention and then have to lie away his surgical scars. He forces even steps up the ramp as the forty-odd Humans are ushered inside and the 'troopers secure them in the harnesses. Cassian understands this as confirmation that they're being transferred to a ship, one that must be in orbit because he knows transports of this class are only short-range and have no hyperspace capabilities.

The ship's hum is unsteady as they rise into the atmosphere. The inside is dull and worn, the seats spiderwebbed with old cracks. The Imperial presence on this planet is meant to look incidental, then, designed not to draw attention. The facility too had looked old and unimportant on the outside, but the flood of 'troopers that had descended down upon them almost immediately confirmed the validity of their intel-- they'd destroyed important research, just as they had intended to. Cassian hopes this means the ship in orbit will be just as old as the transport, that the Imperials have been sacrificing function for appearance just enough to give him the advantage. He has more experience with the older ships. They're easier to escape, easier to slice.

The ship lurches as they break atmo, throwing them all hard against the harnesses. In one of the rows behind him, Cassian hears someone retching onto the floor grates. He hopes it isn't Jyn.

The haze of the atmosphere outside the windows dissolves into the stark clarity of space. 

The ship comes into view.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go with chapter two, in which things are starting to get complicated.

They're separated as soon as they dock. Cassian and a few of the others are led down a long corridor, deep into the ship. The others, including Jyn, are taken somewhere else.

Cassian forces himself not to let his eyes follow her.

The corridors are dull and aged, but well-kept. The computers in a ship this old won't have the capacity to run fully up-to-date programming unless significant modifications have been made, a fact that makes their escape far, far more likely. He makes note of all of the corridor markings as they pass and tries to untangle them into a predictive map, using his knowledge of how ships of this type are typically laid out as his frame of reference. 

The fact that they're not blindfolded or hooded as they walk tells him two very important things. First, the Imperials are not expecting all of these people to be guilty or to be a threat. Second, whoever among them is will not be allowed to leave here alive.

He's lead to a room, alone, and sat in a metal chair. 

The room is otherwise empty and he pastes fear onto his face, burying his rapid scheming beneath the surface of his façade. 

He had hoped to have had more time before they began interrogations, more time to try and plan their escape. This means that the Imperials are already beginning to run their scandocs and thus that Cassian and Jyn only have a few hours before they’re onto them, maybe a few days if they’re very, very lucky and if lack of personnel and resources on this small ship hampers the investigation.

They leave him, for how long he doesn't know. It's a tactic he knows well. Sitting in the metal chair with his hands still bound behind him is nothing short of brutal on his back, but he buries the pain as deeply as he can. He sits silently, shifting occasionally, every motion and glance around the room portraying a nervousness he doesn't really feel. He's too experienced to feel that. What he does feel is a desperation beginning to gnaw at his calm, scraping teeth wearing away the surface layers. Desperation to find Jyn, to know how badly she's hurt, to know that she's okay. 

He pulls at this desperation, binding it into a dense little bundle, forcing it down into the pit of his stomach where it rests like duracrete.

He lets the pseudo-fear create a shell around him, weaving in trepidation and anxiety and a little bit of frustration. He molds it like a shell around himself, pulling it on like a second skin until it fits mostly right, wearing it like a mask. He tailors it to his own shape, the edges and seams invisible. 

The door opens and a tall woman enters. She comes to stand in front of him, hands behind her back, spine rigid. Her hair is pulled back, tight and immaculate, from her face.

"Please," Cassian says immediately. "You've made a mistake."

The woman waits.

Cassian lets his hands and shoulders continue to shake, looking up at her with wide, fearful eyes. "This is all a mistake, please."

"What's your name?"

"Dessen Rix. I'm a trader. I came here looking for work. I was supposed to meet a potential employer by the port this evening. I've never been here before-- I was just, I was just walking around, to see, to see the city."

The woman's lips thin. "Just in the wrong place at the wrong time," she says flatly.

"Yes. Yes! When the explosion happened, it knocked me right off my feet. I was so afraid."

"So you ran."

He nods rapidly, like he's desperate for her to believe him. Which, in all honesty, he is.

"Before the bomb detonated, did you see anything you considered suspicious?"

He catches her attempt to trip him in stride. "The _bomb_? I thought it was an accident."

"So you didn't see anything?"

"I-- no. I was looking at the buildings, at the street vendors. I've never been here before," he repeats. "I've never seen a city like this."

"As a trader, surely you've seen plenty of cities," she says coldly.

"I flew the same route most times. My employer only had a small business, and each of us had our own routes."

Her lips quirk downwards at the corners, just barely, and Cassian knows that she's finding his answers frustratingly satisfactory. "The stormtroopers removed several blades from you when you were detained."

"I carry them to protect myself! Thieves, pirates-- it's never safe." He’d had a blaster too, but he’d taken the calculated risk and tossed it aside just before he was arrested.

The woman hums noncommittally, looks him over, and leaves.

A few minutes later a man comes in and guides Cassian out of the chair. He's young, hardly twenty, soft eyes and a gentle touch wrapped in the gray uniform of the ship's security crew. Cassian is immediately on guard. They're a few corridors away before the young man speaks. "It's okay," he says. "We just need to get this all sorted out."

"I don't understand," Cassian says-- Dessen says. "I'm just a trader."

"I know. If you've done nothing wrong, there's no need to worry." The words actually sound soothing and sincere, which deepens Cassian's distrust. He bites back a retort about how ineffectual words like that are when someone is still bound and being paraded around a ship as a prisoner. He suddenly misses K fiercely and wishes he had been allowed to come along with them. They'd had to be covert as possible, and a seven foot tall security droid is hardly covert, despite all of K's protests that he could be.

The young man leads him to a room. "I'm sorry that you have to share. We don't have much here in the way of accommodations, so you'll have to share until you're released. It's not very comfortable, I know, but you won't be here long." He opens the door. "Take a step inside please." He keeps a hand on Cassian's shoulder for that single step. He unlatches the binders. Cassian knows he could easily disable a single guard, but he'd never be able to find Jyn and escape before being caught. Not yet, not when he knows so little of the ship and about the situation, so he decides to sacrifice a little more of their precious time.

His gaze takes in the room and stops abruptly when it hits the figure huddled on its side, facing the wall. He can't see her face, but those pants and that jacket, the worn boots, those he knows. It's Jyn. 

Of course it's Jyn.

"Is she okay?" he asks the young guard, alarm in his voice that's only partially faked.

"She was injured in the blast, but a medic has already seen to her."

"Oh," he says. "Okay."

"Someone will be by shortly to take her for questioning. Hopefully we'll get everything sorted out quickly."

"Thank you," Cassian says, looking over his shoulder, Dessen's naïve gratitude making it sound sincere, as though Cassian believes any of the false comfort this man is trying to give him.

The door shuts.

Cassian looks around the room, which is empty except for a small attached 'fresher. Small mercies, at least, though it's lacking a shower. No doubt this was once crew quarters, back when the ship was used for something more than floating just outside the atmosphere above a compound so secretive it was meant to look almost entirely defunct and deliberately left largely undefended.

Cassian approaches Jyn slowly, making a show of being hesitant because he knows there are likely cameras. "Are you-- are you alright?" he asks.

"No," she says, and hearing her voice sound so small and so frightened almost drives him to his knees despite knowing it's likely an act.

"Are you in pain? The guard-- he said you were injured. Did they give you anything for the pain?"

"No," she says. "No one has come." Her accent is different, sinking more into the vowels, disguising her normal speech, but the words drive a cold stake of dread straight to the pit of his stomach, directly into the tight bundle of desperation that he's hidden there. It cracks right open, spilling out his own genuine fear. Of course the guard lied.

He kneels on the floor beside her because he decides, consequences be damned, that Dessen Rix is the kind of person that would help a stranger, because Jyn is hurt and needs his help. "What's your name?" he asks.

"Herra," she whispers.

"Herra," he repeats, even though he knows this, even though they went over their aliases in the ship before landing. "I'm Dessen. I don't really know much about... about medicine, but can I help?"

"No," she says, not turning away from the wall.

Cassian wants to argue but forces his own silence. 

He settles against a different wall, trying to ease some of the tightness from his back and hoping the daze of fading adrenaline will leave him soon. "I'm sure the guard was just mistaken and someone will be here soon." Her shoulders tense almost imperceptibly and he knows she's understood his message. Not only does she now know that Cassian was told she'd been seen to, but also that someone is coming for her, sooner rather than later. 

In the small space, Cassian can hear her short breaths, clogged with pain. He doesn't think whatever wounds she has are life threatening, but he's more than a little frustrated that she wouldn't let him at least check her over. He trusts her judgement, though, and lets the silence stretch on, waiting for whatever will happen next.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter, but we're just gearing up...

The same young guard returns. He opens the door and looks inside a bit warily. He pauses when he sees Cassian getting to his feet across the room, but when Cassian makes no move to approach, he relaxes a bit. Cassian had found a single guard suspicious before, but the fact that he's returned alone says that they're not anticipating Jyn to be a threat, and they're not very suspicious of Cassian. "They've sent me to get her for the interview," the young man says. Cassian represses a frown. "Miss?" the guard says, directed at Jyn. "Can you stand?" He takes a wary step forward. 

Jyn pushes herself upright a little, wedging a shoulder against the wall. She keeps a hand pressed into her side and shuts her eyes against the pain. Cassian squats beside her at a polite distance, the distance of strangers. "Here, let me help you." Jyn nods, and only then does he reach out and touch her. He helps her to her feet with a hand on her back and a firm grip on her arm. She doesn't straighten up entirely, remaining slightly hunched over the hand she hasn't moved from her side. She sways on her feet and the guard steps forward to take Cassian's place. There's blood smeared on the floor and on the wall where she'd been leaning. Anger surges into Cassian's chest and he forces it back down, again, into that little ball he's keeping. "She's still bleeding," he says to the guard, leaving an edge in his tone. "She said no one has been here to help her."

The guard looks behind them with obvious concern. "They said someone had. There must have been a mistake. I'll make sure she's cared for," he says with honest eyes. Cassian's suspicion of the guard grows exponentially at his seeming naïvety.

"What's your name?" he asks.

"Laren. Laren Desinto."

"Thank you, Laren. You've been nothing but kind." Laren smiles and it's so innocent that the doubt is like acid on Cassian's tongue.

The door shuts behind them, Laren supporting Jyn, and Cassian is left alone to wonder what benefit false kindness could possibly have for an Imperial guard, or anyone else on the ship.

*

Cassian doesn't know how long it's been when the door finally opens again. He and Laren guide Jyn to the floor, where she curls up cradling her side. There's blood outlining her fingers. She shoots Cassian a frustrated look as Laren turns away, and suddenly he understands. She is injured, and she's not doing well, but she's showing that weakness deliberately in the hope that they'll treat her.

Laren turns in the doorway. "A medic should be here soon, and someone will bring food later." The words are meant to be reassuring, but Laren looks concerned.

"Okay," Cassian says, as if he believes that. 

Laren casts one last look at Jyn as he shuts the door.

Cassian sits beside her, still keeping a respectful space between them, the arm's length of strangers. It pulls at his compressed emotions, cold in his gut, threatening to unravel his alias at its most basic level, but he breathes into the silence of the room and waits for the feeling to become more manageable. 

He wants to ask her what her interrogation had been like, but knows that Dessen Rix would be wary of this woman he's been cast into a room with.

"Are you alright?" he asks instead, as though he's speaking to someone he doesn’t know, someone he wouldn’t willingly surrender his life for, someone he doesn’t trust with everything he is. He knows he needs to speak as little as possible, lest his real self, his real concern, show through the thin veneer of Dessen Rix that he's struggling to hold on to around her.

"Yes," she says, and he knows her well enough to see that the fear she lets show on her face, the fear Herra Fayan would feel, is in large part genuine. It worries him, because she hasn't had nearly as much practice at this as he has. Cassian has learned to be protean, shifting and changing in response to his surroundings, to the situation he needs to fit. Jyn has only ever slipped completely into her aliases, wearing them and shedding them entirely to don another while denying herself. To project Herra Fayan's fear, she's letting herself feel it. That worries him.

He knows she spent years living as other people, burning through alias after alias until they found her in Wobani and brought her back to herself. It was a collateral truth then, a side effect of a larger scheme, but now that identity, her truest self, is the most important thing to him.

Even knowing this, Cassian is powerless to help her.

So they wait in silence. 

Jyn falls asleep after awhile, her breathing less ragged as the pain is dulled by exhaustion.

Cassian waits, forcing patience to take root in Dessen Rix's innocence. He waits, and listens to each of Jyn's soft breaths dissolve into the ambient hum of the ship.

No one comes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi on tumblr!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's one last short chapter after this until we get into some of the meatier sections. I hope you're all enoying!

His stomach feels hollow with hunger, but that's easy to ignore. The burning of strained muscles in his back easily outweighs the backward tug of an empty stomach.

He let himself fall asleep a few hours ago, for how long he doesn't know, but he's sure they've now been in custody for at least a day. 

He lays on his back on the floor, trying to get the inflamed muscles to relax, and he thinks.

The compound was destroyed. This he knows. They'd put their safety-- their lives-- up as collateral for the success of the rebellion, and they had achieved their goal. But he'll be damned if they're not getting out of this mess.

Rescue will not come. Not after a mission like this. 

He tries not to think about the two lullabies he has stitched into his jacket.

Instead he tries to puzzle out whatever the Empire is planning. His interrogation had been startlingly standard, which tells him not only that the Imperials don't know who set the bomb, but also that Jyn had indeed disabled all the surveillance in the area. That doesn't mean they weren't caught together elsewhere in the city, but he can explain that away.

The severe woman who conducted his interrogation isn't very concerning to him. She'd laid exactly the traps he was expecting; he doubts she would think creatively enough to get him to expose his alias accidentally. The whole thing stinks of overconfidence, from the actually poor condition of the ships-- in contrast to the only outwardly poor condition of the compound-- to the poor interrogation tactics.

The young guard, on the other hand, concerns him greatly. If Laren Desinto is playing the same game as everyone else, using kindness as a ploy to make Cassian and-- or, perhaps-- Jyn trust him, then he's already lost. But if he really is so kind, so naive, as to believe that the Empire will show them mercy, innocent or not, then he's a variable Cassian cannot predict.

The only thing he can do for the time being is to be Dessen Rix, to accept Laren's kindness and pretend that he believes it without reservation.

Beside him, Jyn stirs.

Cassian sits up and tries not to let the pain of that motion show on his face.

"How are you feeling?" he asks, like he's wary.

“Terrible," she says, and he wonders if that's Jyn or Herra replying. 

He scoots towards her a bit. "No one came while you were asleep."

"I guessed."

He can see her face from this angle, too pale, her hair pasted to the clammy skin of her forehead and neck. Normally he'd reach out to brush it away, to press a hand to her forehead. His fingers twitch with the desire to touch her, his whole body with the desire to be near her. "You look like you have a fever," he says instead.

"Yeah," she says, almost dismissively.

He's so angry with her apparent lack of care that he forgets himself for the briefest moment and reaches out to press his palm to her forehead; she bats his hand away with a sudden, sharp motion, fixing him with a glare that's all Jyn, a glare that would make Dessen Rix back away. "Don't _touch_ me," she spits, and it's as much a warning not to blow his cover as it is a threat that she'll break his wrist if he tries to touch her again, whether he’s Cassian Andor or Dessen Rix.

He forces himself to back away until he's an arm's length from her again. "I only want to help."

"Don't," she snaps, and there’s something half feral in her reaction that he’s only seen from her a handful of times in the past few months, and never quite as strongly, never quite as directed towards him alone, after Eadu. It’s fear, he knows, but whether it’s fear for herself or for him, he’s not sure. 

The suddenly re-enforced distance feels almost like loss, but he knows she's right to reestablish their boundaries. He doesn't know her, and she doesn't know him. As much as Dessen might want to help, Herra has no reason to trust him.

He tries to puzzle out what to say, but the door opens before he can decide.

"Dessen," Laren says from the doorway. Cassian gets to his feet without a word. "Would you mind facing the other way?" Laren asks. "I need to bind you. It's policy until we can release you." Cassian nods and faces into the room. He can get a better look at Jyn from this angle. The blood on her jacket that had been blotches before is now a stain bigger than his hand. There's a smear of blood on the floor beneath her, fresh from when she'd moved to bat his hand away. He realizes that she's probably been bleeding all night.

She stares back at him from where she's curled on the floor, angry eyes daring him to walk away like he needs to, begging him to walk away like he has to.

The door shuts behind him.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm working the closing shift tonight (one of my last--yay!) so here's to hoping the wifi actually works...
> 
> The next chapter is hella angsty, so prepare yourselves.

They make Cassian wait longer this time. 

He knows that whatever is about to happen, he will not enjoy it. 

He stares at the wall and chases away thoughts of Jyn, pulling the shroud of Dessen Rix tighter around himself. He repeats it like a mantra.

His name is Dessen Rix.

His name is Dessen Rix.

His name is Dessen Rix.

He thinks it, over and over and over and makes himself believe it.

His name is Dessen Rix.

This whole situation is a mistake.

He just wants to get back to the surface, to find a job, to build his life again. What's going on here is none of his concern. He wants them to catch whoever is guilty, and then he wants to leave. He thinks of blood on the floor and knows that he also wants them to help Herra. It doesn't make sense; he knows it doesn't. She could be guilty. He knows she's fierce, and she doesn't want his help, but the core that lies buried deep beneath Dessen's skin-- the tight bundle of frustration and anger and fear and desperation that is Cassian, that is Cassian trapped in a situation spinning out of control-- it bleeds another shade of color into him.

The door opens, and Dessen Rix takes a breath.

The severe woman comes to stand in front of him, and two men stand behind him.

He is very, very scared.

A needle is jabbed into his neck without warning and he flinches away, but the other man holds him still.

It's hot, whatever it is, and it burns quickly from his neck up into his head, down into his chest and his arms and his stomach and his legs. His heart pounds in his ears. His chest feels constricted. His head feels light and empty, but he can't seem to raise his chin from his chest.

She waits until it burns so hot it hurts, and then she speaks.

"What's your name?" the woman asks.

His name. He knows this. "Dessen Rix," he slurs. Those aren't the words he wants to say, but he forces them out anyway, through the heat and the pain.

"Why are you here?"

"You think I did something, but I didn't. I didn't do anything. I just wanted a job." His chest hurts, a searing ache that pulls and constricts with every breath. 

The woman makes a small sound of frustration. Sloppy, Cassian thinks, distantly, muted. "Why were you in the city?"

"I just wanted a job," he says again. "My employer died. I couldn't find work. I just wanted a job. Somewhere to live. Didn't care where."

"You came here alone?"

"No, I came here with the other prisoners."

That sound again, frustration at his accidental sarcasm. "You came to the city alone?"

"Mm'yeah. Just me." Even his face is burning, the motion of air with every breath sharp and harsh against his lips as he speaks.

She hums. "And you didn't see anything when the bomb went off?"

"I saw a lot of people running. Fire. Smoke."

"The woman in the cell with you, has she told you anything?"

"She told me not to touch her. I was only trying to help. I'm afraid she might die." The words are a little thick.

"Why are you afraid she'll die?"

"I don't want her to die."

"Why?"

He raises his head, as hard as that is, as much as whatever they've given him has intensified the pain in his back to stabbing, searing waves that travel up and down the length of his spine, up into his neck. "Why would I want her to die?" he asks, because that's a really confusing question to try to answer.

"You've never met before?"

"No. I saw her when we were detained, and then I met her when I was put in the cell with her."

The woman presses her lips together. He gets the feeling he's just said something wrong. The woman leaves and the two men haul him to his feet. His heart is still pounding a rapid beat in his ears, making everything else sound muted. They drag him down the hallway, pulling him along even as he struggles to keep his feet beneath him.

He's unceremoniously dropped on the floor of the cell. 

It's cold beneath his cheek and he relishes the feeling against his burning skin.

He falls asleep without moving from the heap they left him in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi on my tumblr!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Serious blood and injury tw for this chapter, okay?

When Cassian wakes, Jyn is gone.

His head is foggy and his mouth feels like it's packed with tauntaun fur, but he drags himself unsteadily to his feet anyway. He can see that the blood on the floor is still damp, so she hasn't been gone long. He turns on the tap in the 'fresher, hoping for some water to ease the frankly foul taste in his mouth, but nothing comes out. 

So he sits, like he did the day before, and he waits.

There's little for him to consider besides the thoughts he's already been chasing since their arrest, but he focuses on them to ward off the lingering ache that the burning left behind. Whatever they'd drugged him with was only mildly unpleasant compared to some of the things he's seen used, or used himself, on others. He'd expected much worse. The memories of his interrogation are hazy, but he knows he got through it clean. They'd asked him the same questions as they had before, meaning that they either had been unable to uncover any new evidence, or he wasn't one of their top suspects-- or both.

He can't help but wonder if the Imperials will just give up. He's not sure if that would result in their immediate release or their immediate execution, though, so he dismisses the thought as an undesirable outcome.

He thinks, not for the first time, about how the whole situation ended up so startlingly fucked. 

It all came back to bad parts every time he traced it through-- nothing else made sense. They'd both assembled plenty of bombs before; they'd gone over the schematics together several times, they'd placed it exactly where it needed to be to set off a chain reaction that would destroy the whole compound... But it had blown early, and there was no other explanation for that besides some kind of bad component.

He knows they'd killed more than a few sentients. Innocents, just going about their lives, innocents who didn't deserve to die. He's no stranger to collateral damage. He's seen it and caused it both. His last mission had been like this too, a score of dead innocents whose blood was on his hands, a number he didn't know and was guiltily grateful not to. Jyn had come to him, then, soothing his guilt and his pain and his anger.

Jyn was collateral damage too. 

When the bomb went off, the injuries it caused her were collateral. That weighs on him greatly, but even more heavy is the feeling he's never been able to shake, the feeling that by keeping her near him he keeps her in a state of constant damage that's as much ancillary as it is incidental.

He dozes off against the wall.

He dreams of Jyn, of waking up next to her in his quarters on Echo Base, of her gentle fingers combing through his hair as he'd tried to pull himself together, of holding her, just holding her, because that's more than he ever hoped for.

The door opens and he wakes, the memory of that comfort evaporating. 

Laren kicks the door the rest of the way open with the toe of his boot, both arms keeping Jyn mostly upright. Her chin is on her chest, the arm that Laren doesn't have pulled across his shoulders dripping blood onto the floor from her fingertips. 

Dessen Rix dissolves into background noise.

"Help me with her," Laren says, but Cassian is already reaching out. They lay her down on the floor.

She's hyperventilating. Her pulse is racing beneath Cassian's fingers.

"They drugged her?" Cassian asks. "The same thing they gave me?" Laren doesn't respond, his eyes fixed on Jyn as she struggles to breathe. "Laren," Cassian snaps.

"Yes. I think so. I don't really know; that's way above my station."

He reaches to unzip Jyn's jacket but she grabs his wrist. "Don't fight me," he snaps. Her fingers dig into the tendons of his wrist. He twists in her hold so she's gripping his hand instead. He pulls down the zipper with the opposite hand, pulling the bloody material of her jacket to the side and peeling the hem of her shirt up.

There are four small wounds, and they're ugly. Shrapnel, he thinks. They must be. The entries seem to be straight and clean, rather than ragged, which makes him suspect that it had been metal that had struck her. The edges look inflamed, a sure sign of infection already having set in, but it’s hard to tell through the blood welling out of the wounds, pooling on her skin and soaking into her shirt and the waist of her pants. He can’t see the edges of any metal, but that only tells him that the pieces are likely small and drowned in her blood. He's suddenly livid with her for not letting him look before and the anger almost makes him slip, bringing words to his tongue that he should not say. She squeezes his hand and he remembers himself. He lets go after he squeezes back, just for a moment, to let her know he understood. 

He puts a hand on her hip and runs his opposite hand along her side, tracing along her back. "No exit wounds. Is it still in there?"

"Dunno," she says, breathless still.

"Did you pull any of it out?" He can't keep the sharp edge from his voice. 

"No."

Cassian wants to run a frustrated hand over his face, but both his hands are covered in her blood. She's bleeding profusely, the drugs having increased her heart rate and thus encouraged blood loss.

He turns to Laren, voice tight and angry. "Is anyone coming to help her?"

"I don't know. They just told me to bring her back here," Laren says, all his wide-eyed nativity on display.

"You need to get supplies," Cassian snaps. "If they brought her back here they're not going to help her."

"What?" 

Cassian fists a hand in Laren's uniform. "Towels, bandages, bacta patches. Water. Something to sterilize. A scalpel, and... and..." Oh, fuck him, he's forgotten the word in Basic. He's too stressed; the drugs must not have completely left his system yet, because his blood is rushing unnaturally in his ears with every heartbeat.

"Forceps," Jyn whispers, so quietly he almost doesn't hear it.

"Forceps," he repeats. "And coldpacks or something else to get her fever down."

Laren sits back on his heels. "How do you know this?"

"My mother was a nurse," Cassian lies. "Now go."

Laren leaves without another word, shutting the door behind him.

Cassian pulls her jacket and shirt a little farther out of the way. "You could have told me it was this bad," he says, walking a line between being Cassian and being Dessen.

Jyn just hums a short sharp reply that’s nothing more than an acknowledgement of having heard him. Her eyes are shut and her breathing is still dangerously rapid. He checks her pulse again, leaving bloody fingerprints on her throat. Her heart is beating far too quickly, almost desperately fast.

Cassian watches her in silence. He wants to say something to her, anything, but he can't give himself away any more than he already has. It's a collateral sort of silence, the cost of protecting them, the penalty for everything having gone wrong. 

Laren returns quicker than he expected, arms full of supplies. There's a bloody splotch on his uniform where Cassian had grabbed him earlier. Cassian snatches one of the towels from him and presses it to the wounds in Jyn's side. She makes a strangled noise at the pressure, something between a growl and a groan, and slams the heel of one boot against the floor. Laren lays a package of bacta pads on the floor, opens a towel that was hiding a scalpel and forceps and a coldpack. He's also brought a canteen full of water. 

Cassian takes a few greedy swallows so it's not so full. He props Jyn up against his leg, raising the canteen to her lips. She blinks at it and tries to turn away. "Drink," he insists. She takes a few sips before she gags on it, turning away from Cassian and retching it onto the floor, tinged pink with curling strings of red.

Laren looks horrified. Cassian snatches another towel from him and mops it up before laying Jyn back onto the floor. Her eyes are closed again. "It's okay," he says. "It's okay." He brushes her hair away from her face. Her skin is hot to the touch. She shivers as he moves away from her. Cassian wants to give her his jacket, but their lullabies are in his collar. 

He thinks she carries her own, but they've never really discussed it.

"Herra," he says. "Herra." She finally looks at him. "This is going to hurt. Try not to move." She nods.

"Can't we just... sedate her?" Laren asks.

Cassian strips the forceps from their package. "No. Because I don't know what that drug was. Could kill her."

Laren nods vaguely.

Cassian pours the sanitizer over his hands, trying to scrub them as clean as he can. He dries them on the last clean towel. He doesn't hesitate when he sets the forceps to her skin. He holds her down with a hand on her hip as she struggles. 

The first piece of metal comes easily. 

Jyn pants, starting to hyperventilate again. Her whole body is trembling, shuddering beneath the hand Cassian has left on her hip. Laren moves to sit by her, resting her head on his crossed legs. He lays his hands on her shoulders, giving them a reassuring squeeze.

Cassian knows the only reason she's still conscious is because of whatever drug they've given her.

This is a more effective torture, for both of them, than any of the interrogations they could have faced. That thought makes Cassian's suspicion return in full force, stilling his hand. Laren isn't looking at him, instead focused down at Jyn, concern creasing his brow. Concern that looks genuine, even to Cassian.

Jyn's face is ashen, her lips blanched.

Cassian doesn’t have time for suspicion right now. He digs the forceps into the second wound, the one that he thinks may have nicked her stomach just enough to have her retching up blood, and she screams.

She twists, landing a solid kick to his hip that tweaks his back enough that he grunts aloud. It sends still-intensified pain arcing up his spine all the way into his neck.

He holds her down by her hips. "Shh," he says. "Shh. It's okay." When she finally stops struggling he takes her face in his hands. "I'm sorry," he says. He wipes the tears away from beneath her eyes, replacing them with bloody smears left in the wake of his fingers. "We have to take it out or it will keep making the wounds worse. I know it hurts, but I can't do it if you're moving." She's trembling so violently that she's twitching in his hold. He looks at her and wills her to understand. She nods.

He pins her legs to the floor with his knee. Laren holds her shoulders. 

Cassian tries to ignore the sounds she makes as he searches for the metal. Jyn, who he knows has spent so much of her life not making unnecessary sounds, who is always so quiet except for when she's _not_ , except for when she's arguing with K, or yelling at Kes Dameron for being an asshole, or chatting with Bodhi on sleepless nights, or snapping at Chirrut when he successfully baits her much to his and Baze's amusement-- she's gasping and groaning and making the sorts of strangled sounds of outright agony that are lodging themselves right in his chest like star-hot points of guilt, like their own sort of shrapnel.

When he finally gets ahold of it, she faints.

Laren stiffens. Cassian checks her pulse with his free hand, still finding it too-rapid and strained. "It's kinder this way," he says, and Laren meets his eyes.

Without her struggling, Cassian is able to remove the rest of the shrapnel much more quickly. He pulls six pieces in all from the four wounds, five of them only the size of a fingertip. Cassian knows they'll leave behind small scars like snowflakes on her skin.

Her heart rate is finally starting to slow, and the bleeding has lessened by the time Cassian puts the first of the bacta patches over the wounds. She's still trembling, but it's dulled to a shiver as her body tries to cope with shock.

He activates the coldpack and sets it over the bacta patch to reduce the inflammation and slow the blood flow.

Laren stands on numb legs. "Thank you," Cassian says, and means it for the first time. Laren just nods. He gives Cassian an appraising look. There's a new tightness in his eyes, a thinning of his lips, and Cassian reads this clearly for what it is: suspicion.

Whatever happens next, Cassian knows he's in deep shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops! Poor Cassian. ~~(And poor Jyn, amirite.)~~


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This update is a little early because we'll most likely lose power from this Nor'Easter. I saw eleven (11) cars off the road coming home, and almost totaled my car doing a 360-degree spin-out on a back road. The whole town is without power except for us (because we get it from the itty-bitty town next to us), so it's just a matter of time at this point. Depnding on how wide-spread the outages are (the answer to which is probably 'very'), if we lose power it might be a few days before you get an update... So hang tight and keep your fingers crossed!

Cassian spends some of the next several hours pretending to sleep. He still feels like hell from being drugged, the after-effects lingering in his pounding head and aching body. The pragmatic side of him instilled by years of survival is telling him that he needs to rest while he has the chance. It's a better way to pretend, he supposes. To pretend that he's not listening to each and every breath she takes, every shift of her body against the floor, every breath that's halfway between a sigh and a gasp as her mind registers the pain even through the deep of unconsciousness.

He pretends that each one of those sounds whispered into the silence, evaporating into the ship's ambient hum, doesn't drive the star-hot points of guilt deeper into his chest.

He waits for hours, expecting someone to come. 

He knows they're making him wait, just like they had before both interrogations, only now it's intended to remind him that they're in control even behind the closed door of the cell, even when he can't see them. He’s given them a reason to suspect he's more than just some trader from the mid-Rim, more than he would seem at first glance, and even if his rudimentary medical knowledge is easily explained away, it's still a reason for them to redirect their attention back to him. 

He's also given them leverage, and they're going to use it.

He thinks it's been three days since their arrest, but he's not quite sure anymore. Eventually, he sits up, rolling his shoulders. His back is so stiff from laying on the floor that he has to use the wall as support to get to his feet. His muscles ache with hunger as much as with the drug.

He moves toward Jyn, reaching for the canteen Laren had left them.

Jyn is shivering against the floor, thin tremors traveling through her whole body. He'd heard the coldpack fall off sometime while she'd slept, but it had no doubt been warm by then anyway. The bacta patch is dark and stiff, so he peels it off as gently as he can. The wounds beneath are far angrier than he'd hoped. The skin around them is red and inflamed, indicating the infection beneath. He pastes another patch on, hoping it'll at least help her body fight.

"Herra," he says. "Herra." Her real name, her true name, is heavy on his lips, thick like blood. He presses a hand to her shoulder and shakes her until she stirs.

She blinks at him, half lidded eyes betraying a confusion that concerns him. He wants to reach out and touch her, to untangle her hair, to run his thumb along her chapped lips. She looks a few shades short of death, and that frightens him more than he'd ever thought possible. Her face is colorless, skin shining with a thin sheen of sweat that tells him her fever is higher than it was yesterday. Her eyes are gray in the light of the cell.

Cassian has run plenty of missions where there was no chance of extraction, where he was on his own and could rely only on himself to get back out. Some days, he wouldn't have minded not coming back out again.

Some days, he knows he relies on Jyn to light that desire in him, the most basic desire to _live_. She does, whether she means to or not, leaving it trailing behind her, raging like a wildfire where it touches the deepest part of him.

He's not sure she knows this.

He wants to tell her now, to make sure she knows, but he's supposed to be Dessen Rix and all he can say is what he needs to say. "Do you feel like you can drink some of this?" He swishes the water in the canteen.

She hums, and he helps her sit up. He props her against his leg with her shoulders against his stomach. It takes a moment before she catches her breath, but she takes the canteen from him and raises it with shaking hands, taking small sips.

"I removed all the shrapnel," he says, because there are too many other things he suddenly wants to say into the silence. "I'm not a doctor... My mother was a nurse and I only know a little bit about medicine-- hardly anything, really-- so when they release us you're going to need real medical attention."

She turns those eyes on him, gray in the light of the cell, and says, "Thank you. I haven't... met many kind strangers. You could've just left me, and I... Thank you." 

Her accent is different, rougher and less posh, and Cassian knows that's far more words than Jyn would have used for herself. Even with only a bacta patch to fight the infection that he knows will only worsen, even with nothing but strength of will to manage the pain, even with a fever so high Cassian's not sure if she's thinking halfway straight, he knows she's still in this with him. 

The first time Cassian knew death, he was six years old. It took his family from him, his friends, everyone he'd ever known. He hadn't known then what death looked like, he hadn't known what it sounded like, but when he was staring it in the face his soul sang back with a resonant pitch that struck a chord with death's own song. He did not need to have it explained to him, because in the deepest parts of himself he recognized it, instinctually.

His has come to know this feeling that grips his chest sometimes. It feels like the memory of the weight of water as he was drowning, the pressure of Jyn's arms around him as she pulled him to the surface. It feels like the memory of heat all around them, sand soft beneath his knees, the taste of ash and saltwater on his tongue and the feeling of peace in himself even as the horizon beckoned ruin. 

He knows this feeling, even though he never knew it looked like green eyes and messy hair, or that it sounded like a Core accent and acerbic wit, but when he looks at her she burns so star-bright he has to blink away sunspots. He didn’t need this explained to him either.

He's in love with her. He has been for awhile.

It's making all of this so, so difficult.

She hands the canteen back to him. He sets it on the floor and helps her lay back down. Her face is drawn with the pain of movement. He wants to say something to her, anything that would convey the meaning he wants her to understand, but the words evaporate like snowflakes on his tongue.

The door opens and Laren steps through the doorway. "Dessen," he says, "they want you for another interview." Cassian can't help the glare he levels at Laren at the word "interview." He lets him bind his wrists without protest, though, and only spends one last look on Jyn before he's lead out the door. Her eyes are already closed when the door shuts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reviews and tumblr reblogs make my day!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the well-wishes everyone! Shockingly, we didn't lose power!! I'm so, so greatful to all of you who've been leaving comments; you all make the stress of writing and sharing worth it. Here's another short chapter for you.

They're waiting for him when he's brought into the room. He hadn't expected that, but he knows it makes sense.

He's sat in the chair and the severe woman crosses her arms.

"You've been lying to me," she snaps, and this actually does surprise him. He uses it, lets it show on his face.

"What?"

"I mean exactly what I said. You lied."

"I haven't lied! About anything!" She's reaching, he thinks.

"We have surveillance of you fleeing the blast with the woman who identified herself as 'Herra Fayan'." 

Oh, he thinks. Shit. 

"I believe you've met," she says drily.

"We 'met,'" he snaps, "because I was put in a cell with her. I'd never seen her before."

"That's rather an odd statement, don't you think? Given the fact that we have footage in which you're seen very clearly, pulling her to her feet and fleeing with the crowd."

_Fuck._

"That was her?" he asks, playing it like he's bewildered. "I remember a woman, but I didn't see her face. There was smoke everywhere, and my eyes were burning with it-- I didn't realize that was her."

"And yet you helped her," the severe woman says.

"Because she's _ill_ ," he snaps, and the anger is real. "I don't know if she did whatever you think one of us did, but my mother taught me to help people who need it. I may not know much about medicine, but I did what I could to help her."

The woman frowns and he can tell that the action is genuine. "I'm going to be honest with you," she says, and it's the first thing she's said that has unsettled Cassian. "I'm not sure who's responsible for this. But I will find out. You may think now that letting that woman die will weigh heavily on your conscience, but if you continue to help her you will be considered an accessory if she is found guilty and you will be executed with her. Ask yourself if the life of a stranger is worth your own."

She slams the door behind her and there's something cold writhing in Cassian's gut, constricting itself around that little ball he's hidden away, squeezing and squeezing until it threatens to break open again. Fear is already leaking out, fear and desperation.

As Cassian is guided through the halls by Laren's gentle grip, he studies the hallway markings, testing himself on which follows which.

When he's back in the cell, despite every bit of him screaming to go to Jyn, he settles against the opposite wall. She's breathing, but she hasn't stirred. 

Cassian knows the woman's threats are not idle. The investigation is now focused on them, that much she didn't need to spell out for him. He isn't sure which will come first: their aliases failing or the investigation uncovering surveillance at the landing pads showing Jyn and Cassian together, but either way it won't take an Imperial officer of any unusual intelligence to figure out that they were the conspirators responsible for the bombing. 

He can maybe buy them a little time if he heeds the woman's warning and doesn't help Jyn any more than he has already. She'll get worse, either way, but Cassian knows she's already too ill to deteriorate much more.

Cassian is out of patience, and they're both out of time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're not quite halfway through yet... When I was writing this story, I thought it would have started winding up not so long after this, but, uh, things went and got worse for our poor, long-sufering rebels...


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay, we're halfway there!

They leave him alone for a day.

At least, he assumes it's a day, but it's impossible to be sure. He tries to doze as much as he can. Worry for Jyn is winding tighter around his chest with every spell of shuddering she endures, the movement of her jacket belying the involuntary movement of her body as her fever rises, but the weakness wrought in his own body by days without food makes it easier to sleep.

He doesn't let himself check on her. 

He hears her moving at one point, then the stiff intake of air as she rips the bacta patch from her side. He doesn't hear the rustle of the package holding the other patches and knows she didn't put another on.

He doesn't speak to her; he doesn't paste another one on; he doesn't even open his eyes.

He feels like a stranger to himself, as if the identity of Cassian Andor is recognizing the infection of Dessen Rix as a threat and defending itself with sudden ontological paranoia. That feeling has never made itself known quite so early on in a mission before.

As the hours pass, he becomes more and more aware that they're now on borrowed time. They’ll be discovered soon, and for a crime of such magnitude and with such obvious ties to political dissidence-- if not so obviously to the Alliance itself-- they'll be executed without hesitation. He cannot lie his way out of it. They'll both just be collateral damage for the rebellion, a sacrifice offered up to assuage the beast of the Empire while greater damage can be wrought, a poison that must be consumed to be effective. 

Cassian knows that each member of the rebellion offers their lives, their morality, and their very identity up as collateral for the sake of a war that is so much bigger than any of those things. He knew that at age six and came to understand it by age sixteen. He is willing to lose anything, anything for the rebellion, except Jyn. She's put roots so deeply into his soul that this emotion he never knew but has now recognized blooms in his chest every time he sees her, hears her, touches her.

He loves K, in his own way, snide, snarky K who came into his life accidentally and never really left, though the sound of the locking bolts clicking into place in a vault door still echoes in Cassian's mind. He's truly, truly grateful that he never learned to slice worth half a damn until Jyn came along, because if he had he'd never have botched his hacking so badly as to create a new life out of corrupted programming-- though K of course would deny that he was "alive" in any sense of the concept-- a life that became obnoxious, belligerent, _loyal_ K.

Cassian lets himself drown in his thoughts.

He's become very fond of Bodhi, too, as the months have passed, Bodhi who's so kind and gentle until his friends are endangered. It had been difficult to be around him, at first, as Cassian struggled with the slow process of healing and coming to terms with having been so ready to die in peace and yet thrown back into life carrying such utter pain and misery. Bodhi had been so nervous, so anxious, all nervous energy and stuttering words as he tried to scrape together some semblance of his former self from the pieces bor gullet had left him.

Baze had helped Bodhi, unexpectedly, and later Chirrut had too, when he was well enough. They'd helped Bodhi calm himself, and Baze had taught him, slowly and gruffly, to meditate, to lose himself in the feeling of the Force around him, the intangible pressure against his skin and against his mind. Cassian had listened silently, as he did most days, but he'd learned too. It had made it easier to lose himself, to bury himself deeper, to ignore the thought of K's backup sitting neglected in his quarters. 

He'd been angry, and difficult, and aggressively silent.

And then Jyn had touched him, so gently, brushing his hair away from his face with hesitant fingers and tight lips and he'd felt like a collapsing star, crumbling and lit ablaze all at once.

It had scared the shit out of him.

It's scaring him now too, now that the daunting thought of maybe, just maybe he would get to keep her has shed its skin and morphed into the horror that's shaped like the possibility of losing her.

So he waits, denying himself, denying that fear, denying everything that belongs to Cassian and accepting the confusion and doubt that comes from Dessen.

He waits, and eventually the door opens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry that this is such a microscopic chapter, but giving you a second one would diminish the effect of making you wait...


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that this is coming to you a few hours later than usual-- one of my coworkers asked about some of my research and I spent the part of my lunch that normally would have been used to upload a chapter instead to explain some very specific death rituals in Magna Gracia. So I'm not _that_ sorry.

To Cassian's immense benefit, it's Laren. 

Though he wears the uniform of security, he's been unarmed every time Cassian has seen him. This time is no exception, and he's at ease as Cassian approaches him. Instead of letting himself be bound, however, Cassian knocks Laren's feet from under him, dropping him and pinning him to the floor before he can react. Cassian knows he won't be as strong as Laren after days without food, so he utilizes all the speed he can muster and plays his body weight to his advantage. He's not particularly big, and Laren is taller, but surprise and force are all he needs to lock Laren's arms behind his back and secure his wrists with his own binders.

"What are you doing?" Laren hisses.

"I need your help," Cassian says. "I need you to take me to a computer terminal."

"What?"

Cassian hauls him to his feet even though the strain on his muscles is almost too much to manage. He's exhausted already.

"You need to wake up," he growls. "They're going to execute us unless you help us get out of here, right now." Cassian drags him out the door, shutting it behind them.

"If you haven't done anything wr--"

"Do you honestly believe that? After all of this, do you really believe that they'll ever let us go?"

Laren doesn't respond. Cassian continues to push him down the hall.

"I have no reason to hurt you, or anyone else here. I just want to leave."

"You had no reason to destroy that compound either, but you did. You killed a bunch of civilians, not to mention your partner."

Anger at the insinuation of his guilt burns white hot against his face, momentarily burning through the thin and very flammable shroud of Dessen Rix. "It was an accident," Cassian snaps, and then immediately realizes that he's given himself away. He forges ahead instead of trying to cover his slip. "Do you know what they were doing down there? The weapons they were creating, that they were designing? All sorts of inhumane ways to murder," he spits. "Did they tell you that when you were briefed on this assignment?"

"It doesn't excuse the loss of innocent life," Laren says, caustic and defensive.

"No, it doesn't," Cassian says. Laren looks over his shoulder at him like he's surprised. He looks forward again and Cassian slips the vibroblade from his collar. He pulls Laren to his chest and presses it against his throat, directly on the artery. "You forfeited your right to be considered an innocent life when you took this job. If I have to choose between you and her, I will choose her every time. If you don't take me to a computer terminal, I will kill you right here and find it myself."

Laren tenses at his words but nods, just barely, against the blade.

Cassian guides him forward with an even pressure on his back matched with the pressure of the blade against his throat. Laren leads him through two lefts, straight through the middle corridor of a three-hall intersection, and down a right hand corridor before stopping at a door.

"Are there people inside?" Cassian whispers.

"I don't know. Probably not, but since the bombing things have been different. They don't tell me much, just what I need to be doing, so I don't know."

Cassian opens the door and pushes Laren ahead of him, slowly, as though he's just striding into the room. It's empty, and Cassian kicks it closed behind him, locking it. "Why haven't the alarms gone off yet?

"I'm not sure. They were monitoring everyone that was arrested. There's audio and sound surveillance in all of the rooms." The paranoia of being watched creeps over Cassian's skin again like a cool breeze, held at bay only by the knowledge that he was right to have been so cautious. "The alarms should have gone off already."

Cassian pushes Laren into one of the chairs and sits down at the main terminal, fixing him with a look that threatens harm if he moves. He clicks through the main systems as he tries to untangle all the ways in which the situation could play out. The only solid conclusion he can draw is that this is a trap. They must know he's escaped; they must know where he is. They must know he left Jyn behind, and that frightens him. He has to even the playing field. 

He's watched Jyn slice before, fascinated by the ease with which she understood the systems she was hijacking. He knows looking at these systems that he can shut off the lights, kill the surveillance. But he can't create any sort of lockdown that will last long enough to let them escape. 

He frowns a little more deeply, accessing the security feeds showing video of the rooms and corridors. He sees no unusual movement of the security forces, but this terminal doesn't access the most vital areas of the ship. He could very well be blind to the trap being primed.

"You know," Laren says, so softly Cassian almost isn't sure if he spoke at all, "the Alliance killed my parents."

"And the Empire killed my entire family," Cassian responds immediately, suddenly desperate to make this boy understand. There's not enough time for that, though, so he continues to scroll through the security feeds, bringing up the surveillance of the cells. There are fewer people in them than he expected to see. Fewer people than he saw arrested.

"There are only shades of gray when you're at war," he says, looking Laren in the eye. He can tell the younger man wants to look away, but to his credit he doesn't. "There's no black and white. We sacrificed naïve ideas of right and wrong when we signed up for this. But if you don't help us, right now, when you have the chance, you're just as responsible for killing my family as those who killed my parents." Laren looks to the screen that shows Jyn lying in the cell.

Cassian doesn't want to surrender his ability to monitor the movement of the personnel, but he does it anyway, locking the bulkheads of all the corridors that don't form a direct pathway between the computer terminal, the cell, and the hangar. A second later, he kills the lights and all of the surveillance, rendering them blind. 

In the dark, Laren doesn't move.

"I have a sister," he says after a moment. "I'm paying for her to go to university. She wants to be an engineer, to design ships." Cassian grits his teeth against the knowledge of what kind of "ships" the Empire would likely have her build. "If I help you, I can't protect her. She's all I've got left."

"Then I won't give you a choice," Cassian says, pulling Laren to his feet. It's easier this way, he knows. He'll kill Laren in a second, without hesitation, if he needs to, but he hadn't quite meant what he'd said when he'd told Laren that he'd forfeited his innocence. It was true in a sense, because to the Alliance he was just another face in an Imperial uniform. If there was an attack on this half-derelict ship, Laren would be killed without mercy and without hesitation, a collateral piece of damage wrought on the Imperial machine. The same was true of Cassian in the rebellion, a thought that had never daunted him until Jyn had come along, until Jyn had _stayed_ and become a piece of that always-impending damage as well.

He knows the chance of Imperial retaliation against Laren's sister is a very real threat.

Laren himself is still naïve, still gentle, still doing-- at least insofar as Cassian understands-- the wrong thing for the right reasons. He is still innocent, but has given up any right to be. When understanding of the situation, if the war can even be called something as seemingly harmless as that, settles upon him, Cassian knows that innocence will shatter like frozen glass. Laren's sister, studying on whatever world, however far away, has made no such decision of forfeiture, but could just as easily and entirely unassumingly become collateral damage. It would be a minutia in the scale of the war, so small as to be almost entirely invisible but devastating in the much smaller scale of Laren's life.

Cassian knows this, better than most.

He pushes Laren out of the terminal and into the hallway. The glance the younger man gives him is hard in the pale orange of the emergency lights.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you ever want to hear about the Orpheo-Baccic Gold Lamellae, a freaky tree, and why Dionysos is way more of a vodka aunt than a wine mom, hmu on tumblr (I'm thesearchforbluejello there as well).


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The pain train is a-gainin' steam...

Cassian manages to find an armory locker without Laren's cooperation. It's a stroke of luck that concerns him deeply. It only takes him a minute or so to pick the lock in the pale glow of the emergency lighting; he bites back the lifetime of hard-earned knowledge that luck is hardly so helpful as it seems at first glance. 

He steals a blaster to tuck away in his boot, opposite the ankle where he stows his blade, another blaster to carry, and another to stow in his belt for Jyn, should she be aware enough to use it when he reaches the cell. He leaves the door slightly ajar in case he needs access to the locker again.

Laren walks in front of him without resistance. Cassian is convinced now that Laren's innocence is not feigned. He's perhaps not as naïve as Cassian had first assumed, but his gentleness seems now to be genuine. It worries Cassian even more than if he had turned out to be a direct player of the Imperials, because if they're manipulating Laren in a way he himself is unaware of, it makes it much more difficult for Cassian to see the traps set out before him. It removes him just enough from the source of information to complicate things further. He tries to untangle all the ways in which the Imperials could be playing him as they walk. It all comes back to Jyn, and he tucks his rising panic deep inside himself and slams shut the lid more harshly and more firmly than he's ever needed to before.

It echoes like the door of a locking vault, like the sound of K's voice through the comms, and Cassian can taste sand and salt and blaster discharge. He pushes away that feeling of guilt and tries to drag his focus out of the fog of exhaustion that's gripping him more strongly with every step.

As they near the corner approaching the cell, Cassian pulls Laren against his chest, using him as a shield in case there are guards in the hallway ahead of them. He's hedging his bets that they'll be more hesitant to shoot one of their own than they would be to shoot him.

As they turn the corner, the first thing he sees is Jyn, kneeling on the floor. Jyn, who had once punched Han Solo in the gut hard enough to leave him gasping on the floor for air after he'd grabbed her by the wrist to prevent her from walking away from an argument. Jyn, whose marks from Wobani had lingered for weeks, had scarred. Jyn, who can't bear to have herself restricted or confined, is kneeling on the floor with her wrists bound behind her back, a tight grip on the collar of her jacket the only thing keeping her vertical. There are four guards behind her, and one is holding a blaster to the back of her head.

Cassian lets rage make his face numb, erasing any emotion he could show. He lets it burn down into his chest. He holds the blaster to Laren's temple and waits.

He doesn't look at Jyn. He doesn't look at the dark stain along her side, the dark crust beneath her nails and on her hands. He doesn't meet her half lidded eyes, watching him, glazed with fever but burning his skin with intensity lent by adrenaline and training. She's waiting for him to make his move, and he's waiting for the guards.

"This ends now," one of them says, the one with the barrel of his blaster held to Jyn's head.

Cassian drops all pretenses of Dessen Rix. His mask is heavy on his face, pressing against the numbness of his rage, but underneath he's just himself. If they're going to die here, together, it's enough already that they've been robbed of dying side-by-side. He won't die looking her in the eye as someone else.

"It does," he says, meeting her gaze as he answers the guard's statement. 

The fire in her eyes ebbs his fear. This is Jyn, Jyn who carries all the rage and beauty and gravity of a supernova. Jyn, who knows exactly what he needs her to do. If they die here, at least he'll die with her.

She shifts her weight. He flicks his eyes back up to the guard. She drops her shoulder to the floor, twisting her legs out from beneath her and kicking the guard's own legs from beneath him. He lands in a heap on top of her.

The blaster fire swallows her cry. Cassian takes two of the other guards out before they can get a shot off. The fourth and the guard Jyn had knocked down both fire blindly at him. One of the bolts goes wide, but the other knocks him a step back as the force of it pushes Laren back against him. Cassian kills both of them before they can fire again.

Laren's knees buckle and Cassian lowers him to the ground. He fumbles with the keys he'd shoved in his pocket, unlocking the binders so he can roll Laren onto his back. There's blood all over the front of his uniform. His abdomen beneath is a mess of burned flesh.

"Fuck," Cassian breathes. Laren presses his hands to the wound, choking back a cry as the pressure increases the pain.

"Go," Laren says. "Go home. Take the others with you." Cassian leans back on his heels. "Go," Laren snaps in response to Cassian's hesitation. "The Force requires balance, right? I'm payment for her," he says, jerking his chin toward where Jyn still lies on the floor.

"I don't--"

"My sister will be fine. She'll finish school. She'll find a good job. She'll fall in love. She'll have a good life, exactly the sort I gave up for her. It's balance," he repeats, words tumbling out in a hurried mess. "It's okay. My mother always said everything happens for a reason."

Cassian presses his palm to Laren's cheek and nods. "I'm sorry. I never meant for this to happen." Laren lets his eyes close.

Cassian has to pull the body of the guard off of Jyn's legs before he can get the binders off her wrists. Even with adrenaline pounding through his veins, he knows he's too weak to carry her all the way to the hangar. She reaches an arm up around his shoulders so he can peel her off the floor. She's nearly limp in his hold, her own adrenaline waning rapidly, the pain of her injury too great to allow her to use any abdominal strength to sit up on her own. Cassian ignores the wrenching of his back as he hauls her to her feet and holds her against him until she locks her knees. 

Once she's standing, she takes a step away from him, toward the wall, a hand fisted in the front of his shirt holding him at arm's length as she suddenly heaves blood and bile onto the durasteel. He tries to move toward her but her grip keeps him at bay. He waits, and when she's finished she spits and wipes her mouth with her sleeve. She doesn't meet his eyes, but she does take a step back towards him, allowing him to draw her arm back over his shoulders.

"We don't have a lot of time before they find a way around the lockdown," he says. His voice is strained. He hands her a blaster and tugs the spare from his belt.

"I'll give them a lockdown," she growls, but the words are slurred and he can see the difficulty she has to get them out.

"We need to find supplies first," he says, because his eyes keep wandering to the fresh blood that's shining on her hand in the dim glow of the emergency lights.

"Yeah," she says. She casts a long look at Laren as they pass him, something unspeakably sad in the shadows of her face. Cassian swallows down the guilt that's threatening to suffocate him, pressing against his throat and the backs of his eyes.

Jyn stumbles more than walks beside him, but he half-drags her as quickly as he can. Laren's keys open a storage locker just a few halls down, one he'd noticed earlier but hadn't opened. He hopes there's medical supplies inside.

He leaves Jyn leaning against the racking near the door as he opens boxes and containers. She hooks an arm around one of the vertical supports to keep herself upright. He hears her open a few of the boxes near her, no doubt glancing inside. Cassian finds blankets at the back of the closet and shoves a couple into a bag. Most of what he sees is cleaning supplies, useless even for sterilizing her wounds. Behind him, she hums. He glances back and sees her examining a vial in the low light.

"What is it?"

"I think," she says slowly, "it's what they used to torture us."

"Great," he says drily. Also useless. Jyn hums what he assumes is an agreement. He hears the rustling of a package at the same time he finds a small first aid kit tucked behind some boxes. Thank the Force.

He pulls out gauze and tape and, thankfully, a pressure bandage. There's no medicine, nothing to stave off that infection just a little longer and nothing to lower her fever to something more manageable. He turns to her and finds her pressing a hypo to her own arm, the vial on the shelf beside her.

"What the fuck," he snaps. She lets it fall to the floor.

"You and I both know I'm not going to make it out of here like this," she says. The words sound thick in her mouth. "I need to focus, and I need adrenaline."

There are a lot of things he wants to say against that logic, but none of them will help. She's right-- the adrenaline will likely clear her head a bit, and they'll never make it out of here if he has to carry her. He tries not to think about what a second dose of it will do to her body, about how much it will intensify her pain. He just growls out something akin to a groan and takes part of her weight again, leading her towards the computer terminal and, hopefully, escape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I struggled a lot with Laren's part in all of this, but ultimately I felt that this was the natural progression of things.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made spinach and artichoke dip for a potluck at work tomorrow and I really hope it turned out well. My effctive date for my new position is tomorrow so when it's announced feathers will be... ruffled. So hopefully some comfort food will help people over it.

Her whole body is trembling again by the time they reach the terminal. He shuts the door behind them and tries to study her face in the low light. "How are you doing?"

"'M fine," she says. "Everything's just a little," she waves a hand slightly, "dark."

"The lights are off."

Her brow knits. "Oh. Thought it was me."

Cassian presses a hand to her forehead as she begins to search through the computer systems. The drug has kept her conscious, at least, and mostly lucid, but even just by feeling her skin he can tell that her fever is very, very high. He sets to binding her wounds with the pressure bandage while she slices, ignoring her sharp intakes of breath as he tightens and moves the fabric.

"Can you get the others out?" he asks, but he's afraid of that answer.

She doesn't answer, too intent on her work, and, he thinks, too intent on ignoring the painful new pressure of his hands and the bandage.

Cassian secures the fabric, and he waits.

"I can keep this corridor open," she says finally, voice tight, tapping a finger against the screen. "Don't think anybody's in there. Everywhere else is sealed. Three doors to override before the hangar. I can't open the cells without opening some of the other corridors; it’s all one subsystem. I could do it from another terminal, but we can't get there." Cassian nods. She pauses, frowning at the screen. "There's a chance they'll let them go," she says softly, without meeting his eyes. It's not naïvety, it's hope. Cassian nods again. "I'm going to evacuate the hangar, then seal it."

"How?"

"Release the fire suppression system, then vent it before it kills us."

"That's brilliant."

She smirks at him and for a moment he forgets that she's not okay. The shaking of her hands on the keyboard shatter that illusion.

It's a long minute before she nods. "The hangar should be clear. It'll have vented long enough to let us breathe when we get there."

"Three doors between us and a ship," he says. She nods and he shoulders some of her weight. She takes a few unsteady breaths as they begin to walk.

He can only hope they find something hyperspace capable in the hangar. There's no way he can get back to their own ship. There's still at least one squadron of 'troopers on the surface, probably two at the most since any more would just draw undue attention to the compound they'd destroyed. Either way, it doesn't matter. They'd never make it out of the ship. He just hopes they don't meet that kind of resistance en route to the hangar, that the Imps haven’t figured out who they’re dealing with. They still hadn't seemed to draw the connection between Cassian and the rebellion when he’d started this escape; if they had, he knows there would have been far more than just four guards rerouted to entrap him. His lockdown had been decent, but they could have waited, they could have done any number of things to deter him until they could apprehend him with greater force.

Even then, he probably still would have gotten Laren killed.

They reach the first bulkhead before he even realizes it and Jyn hands him her blaster so she can reach out to the control pad. He slips it into his belt. She doesn't try to remove her other arm from his shoulders; he's taken more and more of her weight as they walked.

It takes a moment for her to open the bulkhead.

Cassian can see the next one from where they stand. The corridor is empty.

Jyn staggers as they start moving again, almost slipping from his grasp. He catches her, one hand holding her arm across his shoulders, the other grabbing her belt with the fingers he's not using to grip his blaster. She pants, trying to catch her breath.

"Come on," he says. "Almost there."

His legs are shaking with the effort of bearing her weight. She shuffles her feet as he pulls her along, doing more to keep herself upright than to actually move forward. 

She blinks at the next control pad. He watches as she hesitantly types the command in, the same as the last one. The doors slide open and, mercifully, the corridor is empty.

He can see the last door, the door that will open straight to the hangar.

They take a few steps towards it and suddenly Jyn is dead weight. The unexpectedness of it throws him off balance. The muscles of his lower back, everything so meticulously built back together after they'd reconstructed his lumbar spine, lock up. He staggers, desperate to stay upright. He grabs Jyn behind her knees, forcing his legs to take all the work his back won't do, and lifts her over his shoulder. 

It's intensely painful.

He gets the door code wrong on the first try. He pushes through the pain and the panic and gets it right on the second try.

The hangar smells of fire retardant, sharp and acidic. His eyes water with it, but he can breathe.

There is a ship towards the end of the bay, small and old but hyperspace capable. That feeling of paranoia at his luck rises again, but he rushes for the ship and hopes it's fast enough. 

He lays Jyn on the floor of the small bay, between the rows of seats. He does a quick sweep of the cockpit, blaster ready, and checks the status of the engines. There's nowhere for any Imperials to hide on the small ship, and the engines check out as operating normally. He knows the ship will have a tracker, but he can disable it from the cockpit; if there's another tracker, meant to monitor his escape, he doesn't have time to find it. He'll ditch the ship on a nearby planet and steal something else before they move on to an Alliance outpost, somewhere they can get transport back to Hoth.

He drops into the pilot's seat and slams his fist on the control to close the ramp. 

The commands to open the hangar doors are saved in the computer; in just a handful of seconds they're out into the black, the planet a sharp curve below and the ship a dark shape behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only six more chapters after this!


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has a passing reference to my one-shot _Breath_ but it's more of a passing nod that elaborates a bit on where Cassian's head is at rather than an important piece.

It takes time to make the jump into hyperspace, time to disable to tracker.

Cassian knows he can't contact the rebellion. Not here, not yet.

It will take time.

He puts the ship on autopilot once they're in hyperspace and goes to check on Jyn.

She's lying right where he left her, tracing his movements with half-lidded eyes as he comes to kneel beside her. "You're awake," he says softly, more for something to say than out of actual surprise. She frowns, wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue. Her brow creases and he's not sure what she wants to say. He feels her pulse and finds it quick and irregular. Her breathing is just as bad, short gasping inhales and slow exhales. She'd no doubt given herself less of the drug than the Imperials had, but it's still wreaking havoc on her already struggling body. 

He'd carried her out of the rubble of a bombed-out building just a few months before. He'd carried her through the city, covered in her blood. This fear feels just like that fear, sharpbitter like the taste of her blood on his tongue as he breathed it in, cold where it twists in his gut.

They'd been closer to Hoth then, and they'd had K. Cassian doesn't know anything even approaching a third of the medical knowledge K has stored. At least his own bedside manner is considerably better, but he'd give anything to have K here to help.

He brushes Jyn's bangs away from her face. "Where's everyone?" she says.

"What?"

Her brow creases a little more. "I heard Bodhi," she says, gesturing vaguely with one hand, "flying."

"Bodhi's not here. They're all on base."

"Oh," she says. "Thought I heard him say my name."

Cassian runs his fingers along the creases on her forehead. He's so, so frightened. 

He pulls her shirt up to check her bandage. The lower layers of it are scarlet, but she hasn't bled through. He tries to consider how much blood she's lost, but he doesn't even know how many days have passed since they were arrested.

"Cassian?" she says.

"Yeah?" He runs his thumb along her cheekbone, along the flaking smudge left by his fingers yesterday, or the day before, whenever it was that he held her to the floor and made her suffer just for the chance of saving her life.

 

"Are you okay? You look worried." Her voice is still rough from exhaustion, but Cassian is so, so happy to hear that Core accent she carries, the sort of accent he’d always hated before her because it meant privilege, it meant money and status and the lie of stability. With Jyn, though, it means none of those things; it’s something she carries from her parents, a reminder of the life they’d tried to give her even despite the shadow of the Empire, something that belonged to neither of them and, ultimately, would never belong to Jyn either beside in a few fragmentary memories.

"I'm okay," he says, but the words are thick in his mouth because he has done nothing, nothing to deserve her. She reaches up to him but halts the movement with a gasp. "Careful," he says, "careful."

She feels the bandage. "I got hurt?"

"Yeah, Jyn, you got hurt. You don't remember?" He's holding her hand, too tight. She shakes her head. "That's okay. We're going to land soon, and then we're going to get another ship and go home, okay?" She nods. "Just try to get some sleep."

He sits, despite his back, and he waits with her until she's asleep. Her breathing doesn't change from its strenuous pattern, but he sees the tension melt from her shoulders. 

He leans back against one of the seats and closes his eyes, just for a moment.

*

He wakes to the screeching of alarms in the cockpit. Jyn is still asleep.

He staggers to the cockpit and drops into one of the seats, scrubbing a hand over his sleep-numbed face to try to wake a little more. They're approaching the planet he had chosen at random as their destination. He's been asleep for five hours.

He struggles to think through the pain and fog in his head to give the proper responses when the port officials prompt through the comms. He's been here before, once. Out here at the edge of Imperial space they go through the motions of security, but the economy thrives off illegal dealings. The biggest threat is someone noticing the ship as stolen property and reporting them for a reward. They have to get out quickly.

It's night on the surface and it takes Cassian two hours in the dark to find a ship to steal. It's small, battered, and empty of cargo.

He rushes back to their stolen ship to get Jyn.

She hasn't moved since he left, and her face looks ashen now in the bay lights. Cassian slings the bag full of blankets over his shoulders and struggles to lift her into his arms. The lights swim in his vision as he stands, everything going gray at the edges. He slams a hip into the seats as his knees buckle; the impact and the support of the seat against his hip let him regain his footing.

Severe dehydration, he knows. Lack of nutrition, he knows. Exhaustion, he knows.

There's no one around to see as he carries Jyn to the ship. It’s a good thing, he thinks, because he's moving like he's drunk and he's got an unconscious woman cradled in his arms. There's a good chance no one would say anything anyway, but it's not a chance he'd like to bet on.

He barely remembers giving the codes to leave the port, and he doesn't remember having made the jump to hyperspace at all.

He makes a transmission once they're in hyperspace, encrypted as a message to his cousin, alerting the outpost to expect them. At the speed that the little ship can travel, they're ten hours out. 

He moves to the back of the ship, letting himself sink to the grating beside Jyn, resting his back against the wall. He watches her for awhile, watches the unsteady rise and fall of her chest, before he drifts off.

*

When he wakes, it's because he's shivering.

He can see his breath escaping in white puffs, clouds of steam illuminated by the ship's lights.

Fuck.

He rips the blankets out of the bag and bundles Jyn in them, dragging her onto one to protect her from the durasteel of the floor and wrapping her in the other. A check of the con tells him that they're still six hours out. He doesn't want to think about how cold it might get in here if they're in hyperspace that long. There's no response from the outpost, so he sends his message again. 

He spends an hour in the cockpit trying to reroute power to the internal heating system without compromising the engine operations. It's hard to focus, but he manages to weasel out a thirty percent increase by sacrificing some of the non-vital systems. He wonders who the hell would ever have flown this ship like this.

Behind him, Jyn makes a noise that he almost doesn't hear over the grinding hum of the engines. He turns, not sure if he imagined it. She shifts beneath the blankets, the first movements he's seen her make in hours. She shifts again, digging her heels against the grating. 

He's by her side in a moment, rolling her over as she begins to seize. It's weak, tremors shuddering through her for less than a minute, but he feels it as a lifetime as he listens to her gasping.

She goes limp when it's over. There's blood on her face when Cassian eases her onto her back again and he's not sure if she's bleeding internally worse than he'd thought or if she's bit her tongue.

It takes him a moment to realize that she's no longer gasping and a moment after that for him to realize that she's not breathing. He presses his fingers to her throat and finds nothing.

The stress of the cold ship on her fevered body had likely thrown her into shock, causing a seizure that had been too much for her body to handle.

Cassian's breath leaves him in a sob and he sets his palms to her chest, trying desperately to make her heart beat. He tastes blood, sharpbitter, when he breathes into her, breathes for her.

It's a long minute before she takes a small sip of air, just a thin breath. Her pulse is faint beneath his fingers.

Cassian sits back and wipes her blood off his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket. He can see his tears shining on her face in the ship lights. He struggles to breathe through the pressure in his chest, the overwhelming weight of the knowledge that she just died under his hands.

He probes around the wounds with cold fingers, feeling the stiff resistance that’s settled into her belly. It means blood, he knows, blood that’s settled into the interstitial spaces of her abdomen from the internal trauma. He’s seen this before, and he knows.

It means death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My spinach and artichoke dip has been better, and I've been better, but we're almost done with this story!


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter, and we're almost finished!

He's still fighting to stay awake when they reach the outpost. Jyn is still breathing, still alive, however barely, and he's stayed awake to make sure she stays that way. He stopped shivering about an hour ago, and his fingers are numb as he types in the landing sequences. The comms crackle a message he doesn't catch.

"Base-- repeat?" he says.

"You're cleared for landing. Your message indicated the need for medical attention; are you hurt badly?"

"Not me. My partner-- my partner's hurt."

The voice crackles through again but Cassian doesn't understand the words. Everything is fading into gray and he's focusing on trying not to slam the ship into the landing pad. As it is the landing is graceless, the ship hitting the pad harder than it should. Cassian presses the control for the ramp and hears the hydraulics working even through the ringing in his ears. Beings rush onto the ship, some of them surrounding Jyn, a few of them rushing to Cassian's side. A human man in a flight suit reaches for Cassian's arm. Operating on instinct, he flinches away, but as he turns the floor is suddenly rushing up to meet him.

*

He wakes once or twice as they're carted through the outpost, all hazy lights and muted voices. He tries to sit up, to find Jyn, but something warm rushes through him and he drowns in silence.

*

When he wakes again, he wakes all at once, in a panic. There's blankets over him and he rips them off; there's an IV in his arm and he pulls it out.

A droid nearby shrieks an alarm.

Cassian tries to stumble to his feet but only succeeds in landing gracelessly in a tangled heap on the floor.

Two sets of arms haul him back up onto the bed. 

"Please, remain in bed for your own safety," the droid says.

The medic shoots it a dirty look. "It's okay," he says, resting a hand on Cassian's shoulder that he immediately knocks away.

"My partner," Cassian says, trying to string the words together into a coherent whole. "She-- is she-- she alive?"

The medic nods. "We're prepping her for transport to Echo Base immediately. We've stabilized her for now, but we can't help her here."

"I'm going with her," he says, a statement rather than a question.

"Yes," the medic says. "We're sending you both. No sense in you waiting for another transport."

"I'm going with her," Cassian says again, as though it's imperative that the medic understand.

"You are, yes." The medic's frown deepens. "You should consider sending a message to any family that she might have, as well."

"It's me," he says automatically, without all the gravity that he will later think should accompany that statement. "I'm her family. And our team."

The medic nods, sitting him back down on the bed with firm hands on his shoulders. After a moment he returns with a datapad.

Cassian's fingers are numb as he types. "Dearest cousin," he writes, a weak encryption should the message be intercepted, "we're on our way home. Little sister is unwell." It's a short message, brief and sterile, but the meaning will be clear. If they were alright, if her injuries were anything less than life-threatening, he wouldn't be sending a message at all.

The medic takes the datapad when he's done and moves to put a fresh shunt in Cassian's arm. "I don't want that," he says. The medic opens his mouth but Cassian interrupts. "I want to see her."

"Not right now," the medic says. "She's being prepped for transport. You'll see her back on Hoth in just a few hours."

"No, let me see her before--"

The medic interrupts. "They are trying to save her life. If you don't let them do their job, she won't make it back to Hoth. She needs emergency surgery, okay? She stopped breathing on her own a few hours ago and is still bleeding internally. The faster they can get her prepped, the faster we can ship both of you back there, understand?"

Cassian nods, even though he wants nothing more than to haul himself out of bed and march over to where he knows they're keeping Jyn, behind a heavy curtain. He just wants to see her, to feel her skin against his fingertips. To know she's alive.

Before he can make any decisions about defying the medic, the shunt is in his arm and the ceiling lights become hazy before they dissolve completely into black.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the lack of chapter last night-- I had the closing shift at work and I came home in such a bad mood that I couldn't muster the mental or emotional energy necessary. 
> 
> There is a vague reference to _Crumbling_ in this chapter and direct references to _In the Space Between_ and _Breath_ (again). If you're familiar with my one-shot series then I should probably elucidate that this is before _Sound and Silence_ and after _Infinite Sea_ and everything that came before it. Which is, like, everything at this point, but it may not be eventually.

The first thing he notices is how dry his mouth is.

The second thing he notices is the headache.

He wipes at his eyes, trying to ease some of the stiffness that's crept into the corners. There's a pinch in his arm and he looks down to see an IV shunt. He moves to pull it out but K says, "Cassian," at the same time Bodhi says, "No, leave that in."

He blinks at them, trying to force the blurriness out of his eyes. Bodhi hands him a cup of water and he takes a slow sip, gripping the cup with both hands. His arms are so tired they're almost numb, but he's not sure if that's from the sedative, the actual exhaustion, or both.

Bodhi's hands are clasped in his lap. Stiff. Feet on the floor. His tension belies his stress, stress at a level higher than that which usually makes him fidget. 

"She's still alive," Cassian says. His voice is rough.

"Yes," Bodhi says. "They rushed her into surgery as soon as the transport landed. They-- they weren't sure if she'd... if she'd live. But she did. She's been in bacta for a few hours. I think-- they're supposed to take her out soon. And then we can see her, for a little while."

K has been watching Bodhi speak, his head turned just slightly toward him. He turns back to Cassian, but is silent. Cassian doesn't find his lack of input on Jyn's odds of survival comforting.

Bodhi takes the cup from his hands. "We'll wake you up when she's out," he says. Cassian just nods, because he's powerless against falling back asleep.

*

"Captain," he hears, and Baze's hand is on his shoulder.

He blinks against the light, then struggles into a sitting position. "She's out?" Baze nods. Cassian manages to swing his legs over edge of the bed. "How is she?" he asks, and the heaviness of the words in his mouth have nothing to do with exhaustion.

Baze shrugs. "It's difficult to say with things like this. Doctors can't tell, but time will."

Cassian nods, pulling the shunt from his arm. He uses his thumb to wipe away the blood that beads on his skin. Baze steadies him as he stands; his legs ache and resist his urge to move. His back is painfully tight, the knots pulling with every breath and sending shocks of pain down through his hips. Even so, he hobbles across the medbay next to Baze, who watches him out of the corner of his eye, shoulders tight and ready to catch him if he stumbles.

When he sees her, it’s like someone has kicked him in the chest. His breath catches in his lungs and he feels it like a physical blow, the kind that he knew was coming but could do nothing to lessen the impact, the kind that he can do nothing but wait until the pain is over. This pain, though, he somehow never wants to end. If it ends, if it loses this flavor of anger and frustration and absolute despair that presses down on his tongue and his chest like the weight of the ocean, then it will only mean she’s gone. It would taste different, then, he knows, sharp and acute, cutting with an edge shaped like loss, and wholly unlike the consuming bluntness he feels it as now. He could push it aside, ignore the bitter taste souring every breath he took, pretend there was not a space at his side that she was meant to occupy, pretend that his quarters weren’t colder, his mornings weren’t darker for knowing that she wasn’t there and wouldn’t be again.

He only knows he’s stopped moving when he feels K’s hand on his shoulder. 

“Odds never seem to matter to Jyn Erso,” he says.

Cassian nods because there are no words for him to say.

He sinks into a chair next to her bed and still feels like he’s sinking even after his body has stilled.

“I can’t-- I can’t stay,” Bodhi says. “I’m on a supply run at eighteen-hundred. I have to be in the-- on the pad in a few minutes.”

“We’ll watch over her for you,” Chirrut says. “She will be here when you get back. There are more things for her to do, I think.”

Bodhi reaches out, his fingertips just skimming the back of Jyn’s hand. The motion makes it impossible for Cassian not to look at her, just for a moment, and then he looks away again, staring at the sheets, at the faded-pale blue, wrestling against the overwhelming desire to leave, to run, to never know how this will turn out because he’s too afraid of what will happen.

He breathes until it starts to ebb. Chirrut breaks the momentary silence after the sound of Bodhi’s footsteps has faded. “Baze and I must also go, but we won’t be gone long.”

“Who ever thought a rebellion would have so many meetings,” Baze grumbles.  
Cassian has the presence of mind to nod, but doesn’t reply. Chirrut places a hand on his shoulder as he passes. The overwhelming urge to flee comes over him again, cresting like a wave, pounding at his chest.

He can’t breathe again until after their footsteps have faded into the hallway. “Can I just-- have a moment, K?”

He hears the slight shift of K’s weight in the soft squeak of his chassis always brought on by Hoth’s chill. “I am not sure it’s…” K pauses, as thought he’s rethinking his words, an event so rare that Cassian notices despite everything. “I would prefer not to leave you alone.”

“I’m fine. I just… I need a moment, K.”

“Fine,” he says, but it’s an agreement lacking any of his usual acidity. Cassian wonders if he’s missed the sarcasm and K is just parotting his own word back at him.

K’s heavy footsteps stop just on the other side of the curtain and Cassian can see his shadow, distorted by fabric, on the floor.

Cassian looks, finally looks, at Jyn. He feels his mask shatter, crumbling away and leaving him exposed beneath. He bites his lip, trying to salvage the pieces even though he knows he’s alone. Its barrier is the only thing that keeps the despair pressing against his chest from settling in, seeping into his pores and settling in his lungs, thick and congealed and suffocating.

She looks like she’s already died.

Her face is ashen against the faded-pale blue of the sheets, dark shadows heavy like bruises beneath her eyes. Her lips are pale and cracked and he tries not to look at the tube that’s been put down her throat to breathe for her.

He brushes a lock of hair away from her neck.

She’s clean now, no traces of her blood left on her skin after having been prepped for the surgery and submerged in bacta for hours. The smell of the bacta lingers on her skin; he can smell it, sour and earthy. 

Grief is suffocating, Cassian knows. He can feel it, saltwater-harsh in his chest, his throat, behind his eyes. He tries to breathe through it, forcing unsteady breaths through the ocean-deep pressure.

The fibers of the pillow catch against his nails as he runs his fingers through her hair. He follows the strands down to her shoulder where they rest. He can feel the slight tackiness of the bacta on her skin, the sheen of it that’s so difficult to wash off. It’s ever so slightly resistant as he traces his fingertip along her collarbone, following the curve of it where it’s exposed by the ill-fitting, worn-soft fabric of the shirt they’ve put her in. 

He wants to touch her. He wants to hold her, to just tangle together in his bed and sleep until they both feel better. He’s never craved the touch of another person before-- quite the opposite; he’s always been hyper-aware of anyone standing in his personal space, the brush of a body against his, the feeling of skin against his own. It’s always been something to be avoided. With Jyn, though, with Jyn it was a comfort on the beach, a hyper-awareness of belonging, of knowing that he wasn’t alone. He can still remember the feeling of her fingers brushing his knee, touch muted through the fabric of his pants, and then his hand finding hers, dirt-soft and grime-gritty and blood-slick, granules of sand rough against the ridges and grooves of his palm and the space between his fingers, and then her skin against his, the remnants of battle and pain the only barrier between them.

The first time she’d slept in his bed, they’d kept each other almost at arm’s length. When he woke, he realized that he’d wrapped himself around her, legs tangled together, his arms holding her against his chest. He could feel every one of her breaths soft against his neck.

The first time he kissed her, _Force_ , the first time he kissed her it was because he was afraid, because he could see her closing off that gentleness she’d had with him, shutting down and withdrawing. He’d seen that kind, gentle part of her that she kept so carefully hidden away, and he was desperate to make her understand that it was okay for her to show it to him. So he’d almost unthinkingly broken every boundary they’d established between them, taking her face in his hands and kissing her, chastely because he needed her to know that he didn’t expect anything from her, nothing more than she was willing to give him without need or expectation. He’d been so afraid. Then she’d smiled. Force help him, she’d smiled and she’d run her thumbs along his cheekbones and she’d kissed him back. 

He’d known then that he was ruined. The pull of her gravity on him was inexorable and inescapable because it left him powerless to even _want_ to live without it.

It’s new and fragile, this trust that they have, even after months of building it painstakingly, piece by piece, pasting shreds of what they’ve lost into a whole that’s just beginning to become _something_. Cassian knows what love is-- he knows that this is love in part because it’s such a complex kaleidoscope of beauty and anxiety and excitement and fear that he can’t make the label fit quite as tidily as he always imagined people did. He also knows that love is only a force capable of resisting the universe in stories, stories that are kinder and neater and wielding a symbolism far richer than his own life. He fears this, and he’s always known that Jyn does too. He fears it now, more than ever, because if this thing they’ve been building shatters in his hands, the shards will be too sharp for him to put them-- or himself-- back together.

He stands and walks past K, over to a droid puttering around the medbay. “Where are her personal effects?” he asks.

“Jyn Erso’s clothes were-”

“Not her clothes; she had a necklace, a necklace with a crystal. Where is it?”

“I will retrieve it for you.” The droid stalks away, gangly and slow.

“You should be in bed,” K says. “You will not heal as quickly if you are on your feet.”

“I’m fine.”

“Cassian.”

“I’m fine. I’m okay. I’m going to go shower, and then I’m going to go to sleep.”

K looks at him for a longer moment than he expected. It’s surprise, Cassian knows, surprise that he’s going to leave Jyn here, alone. When she’d been injured before, when she’d had a whole building come down on top of her and only K’s medical knowledge had saved her life, he’d stayed by her in the medbay for a day before she’d woken up, not even leaving to shower, sleeping slumped over with his head on the bed beside her.

K rests a hand on Cassian’s shoulder. “I am glad that you are alright.”

Cassian reaches up and touches K’s arm. The attempt at a very human interaction isn’t lost on him. “Thank you, K.”

“Don’t thank me. I find that I am hoping for Jyn Erso’s survival. It is not a change in my behavior that I anticipated.”

Cassian smiles, just slightly, despite despair and fear and exhaustion and everything else he’s feeling because that is perhaps the kindest thing K could have said.

The medical droid steps heavily back over to where they stand. It holds the kyber crystal out to Cassian. “I believe this is what you were seeking.”

“Yes, thank you.” Cassian wraps the cord around his hand and grips the crystal against his palm. It’s cool in a way it never has been when he’s felt it against Jyn’s skin. He wonders if all the stories he’s heard from Chirrut about kyber has been nothing more than exaggeration and the crystal is just cool because it’s been lying in storage somewhere in the medmay, cooled by the perpetual chill of Echo Base and not warmed by Jyn’s bodyheat.

He turns and walks toward the doors. “Sir,” the droid squawks. “You haven’t been cleared for release.”

Cassian keeps walking. The droid takes a step towards him but K comes between them, straightening up to his full height as he seldom does, standing tall enough that the droid doesn’t even clear his shoulder. It stops, and after a moment K follows Cassian out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys I really love K. Can you tell?


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter honestly wrecked me more than the previous one as I wrote it.

He thought he’d sleep, he really did. 

His head aches with exhaustion, still, but sleep won’t come. 

The shower had been nice, at least, and he’d tried to let the hot water ebb his soreness and grief to a dull ache. It had come back as soon as he’d struggled with stiff shoulders into a shirt he’d caught Jyn wearing the week before.

He’d caught his breath, pushing aside the phantom scent of her lingering on the fabric. When he’d left the ‘fresher, K had held his hand out, Jyn’s necklace in his fingers, the crystal twisting slowly in the cool air of the room. Cassian had accepted it without a word, not trusting himself to speak. There were no words powerful enough to acknowledge that gesture anyway.

He tries now to work on his mission report, detailing exactly how everything went completely fubar before they could even get a handle on it. Detailing exactly how they’d been tortured intentionally, omitting how they were tortured accidentally. He gets through a fairly detailed analysis of the botched bombing and an account of their arrest, but finds himself floundering when he starts to detail the first time Laren led him to the cell. 

He can see Jyn in his mind’s eye still, curled on the floor. He can still feel the shell of Dessen Rix around him, clinging like a chill. He tries to push through and detail their interrogations, but he can’t get past the reminder of having to let Jyn suffer, of having to _make_ her suffer.

He can’t get past the thought of being responsible for Laren’s death, either.

K is in the corner, powered down. Cassian tosses the datapad onto the table, startling K into alertness. He straightens up immediately, scanning the room for threats, yellow optics glowing in the dark.

“I’m sorry,” Cassian says. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“I cannot be frightened.”

“Startled,” Cassian corrects out of habit rather than irritation. He’s too tired for K’s usual pedantics.

“You should sleep.”

“I know, K,” he sighs. K doesn’t often stay in Cassian’s quarters. It makes Cassian uneasy, waking up in the dark to see another figure in the room, fear flooding him before he realizes who it is. But when K had insisted, Cassian hadn’t argued. 

He shuts the lights off. All he can think about is Jyn holding herself up with the shelf in the storage closet, pressing the hypo to her own arm. She was so brave, brave enough to know that he wouldn’t leave her, brave enough to drug herself with something that had almost killed her before, and would almost kill her again.

She was brave enough to buy herself just a little more time, to make sure Cassian lived, even knowing she might not.

He tries to sleep. He doesn’t.

*

K remains a fixture at his side as the days pass, following him to the mess hall to “ensure his compliance” when Cassian begrudgingly gives in to his badgering to eat something, following him to the medbay when Cassian finally agrees to Bodhi’s pleas to visit Jyn, staying in his room at night to make sure he’s resting, at the very least, though he’s been getting little sleep.

On their sixth day back on base, he dozes off in the chair next to Jyn’s bacta tank. He wakes with a start only a short time later, K’s hand tight on his shoulder.

“I have been told that we need to move,” K says. Cassian looks back at the tank, which is now almost completely drained. 

Jyn had been floating before, her hair a wild halo around her face, looking almost peaceful in the haze of the bacta. He’s watched her sleeping before, completely and utterly enraptured by the fact that she would trust him enough to be so openly vulnerable beside him. She looks so young in those stolen moments, a reminder that despite a lifetime of survival against an unyielding galaxy she’s still barely into her twenties, still younger than him. Sometimes it’s almost hard to reconcile her in those moments with the woman who wields her body as a weapon, who fights unrestrained, half feral, with a lethal brutality he can’t help but admire despite it being anathema to everything he’s been trained for.

Cassian has seen a lot of death and a lot of bodies. He knows the way death strikes, the way a body hits the ground when violence steals its life. It’s seldom so dramatic as the holovids make it look; a body falling is just inanimate meat, crumbling under its own weight. It can’t control how it falls.

That’s how Jyn looks now, on the floor of the tank, having been gently settled by the ebbing level of bacta. Her face is tilted to the side, away from him, one hand caught beneath her back, legs twisted just slightly enough to dispel any illusion that she’s resting comfortably.

It’s wholly incongruous with how he sees her, with the star fire she somehow harnesses into herself, with the powerful and frightening force of gravity she wields over him.

It terrifies him, and when he leaves to let the medics take her from the tank, he doesn’t look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you were wondering, the part where she was in the tank was what wrecked me. Absolutely destroyed me. It's like... not worse than the previous chapter? But Cassian's thought process just... man.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe we're almost at the end! Only one chapter left after this.

Draven sets the pad on the desk and regards Cassian, expressionless, as usual.

“Your report isn’t as detailed as I would have expected,” he finally says. “As it usually is.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“What’s going on, Andor?”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“The medbay says all traces of the drug you were given have finally left your system. They’ve given you clearance to return to light duty, barring field work.” Cassian nods. Draven evaluates him for a moment more before continuing. “You look like you haven’t slept.”

“I have,” Cassian says, even though it’s mostly a lie and has been for days now.

“I doubt that.” Cassian is silent. “I can’t-- I _won’t_ clear you for duty until I can look at you and see that you’re okay.”

“Sir--”

“No,” Draven says. “This is an argument you won’t win. I can see that you haven’t slept. I can see that you haven’t eaten. When was the last time you even shaved?”

Cassian feels his brow furrow despite his attempt to keep a neutral expression. He can’t remember the last time he shaved. He hadn’t really been thinking about it.

“You expect me to believe that you’re fine.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You expect me to believe that you’ve had missions worse than this, that it’s all said and done and you’ve left it behind you.”

“I have had missions worse than this,” Cassian says, because they both know that’s not even a debatable point.

“Yes,” Draven says. “You have.” There’s a pause, and Cassian knows exactly where Draven will go with this. He’s ruthless, and that ruthlessness has kept Cassian alive in the field-- and out of it, if he’s honest-- more times than he can count. “I don’t know if this is partly about that kid, or if it’s just about Erso,” Cassian feels his face snap back into his mask immediately, and notes from the subtle quirk in Draven’s eyebrow that he sees it too. “I want her to pull through, Andor, I do, despite whatever… differences she and I may have had in the past.” ‘Differences’ was putting it lightly, Cassian knows. “There’s no room for this in the war,” Draven says, and it’s almost sympathetic. “I never said this, because I wasn’t… I didn’t…” Draven pauses, and Cassian can’t remember the last time he saw the man struggle for words. “I can’t imagine what you went through on that beach.” Cassian’s breath solidifies in his lungs. “I can’t. You’ve been through so much more than this, so much more than a bunch of arrogant Imperials who couldn’t tell the difference between an Alliance operative and a tooka if it bit them in the face. I don’t know how you want to look at this, Andor, but you need to find some way through this too, whatever happens. 

“I’m giving you four more days until you’re back on the duty roster. Sleep. Eat. Then you’re back in the rotation. I’ll reconsider sending you back into the field when, and only when, I think you can handle it without getting yourself or anyone else killed.” Daven has never been one to pull punches, and Cassian knows this is a test. He feels his lips tighten and knows that he’s failed, just like Draven knew he would.

“Sir,” he tries again.

“You’re in no condition to do any kind of field work, and that’s that. I don’t care how much you want to run away from whatever demons are chasing you right now.” 

Cassian feels anger settle into his face, tightening his lips and tensing his brow. He knows Draven can read it easily. 

Draven moves toward the door, but pauses. “Have a little hope, Andor. I know it can be… painful, but… there’s always hope. Sometimes it’s for the future, sometimes it’s a reminder from the past. You just have to look for it. It’ll be there.”

Cassian sits in the room alone for a moment before standing and leaving as well. Draven has already disappeared, so he walks slowly back toward his quarters. He shoves his hand in his pocket and grips the kyber crystal. It’s hot against his skin; he could feel it through the fabric of his pants while Draven spoke. He knows he should visit Jyn, but his feet have refused to carry him to the medbay since the day he left it, more than a week ago.

Instead, he finds himself back in his quarters, alone, laying with his eyes open in the silence. He doesn’t know where K is. He’s been avoiding Bodhi, Chirrut, and Baze for days.

He can’t help but hear that sound Jyn had made as he’d held her down, trying to pull the shrapnel out of her side. He can still feel the bruise where she’d kicked him as she’d tried to pull away.

He can’t help but to see Laren close his eyes.

His comm chirps. He doesn’t answer. It continues to chirp until it stops, then it chirps another cycle. He doesn’t answer.

He lays in his bed until someone starts pounding at his door.

Dread is cold and tight in his belly as he rises and keys the door open.

It’s Bodhi, but he’s not crying like Cassian expected.

“Cassian, she’s awake. She woke up.”

*

When Cassian enters the medbay, Chirrut is sitting at the edge of Jyn’s bed. He’s smiling, but Jyn isn’t. Baze is sitting in the chair and K is standing at the end of the bed.

They all look at him when he and Bodhi enter. He’s breathless already, and the way she’s looking at him steals the rest of his breath away.

He settles on the side of her bed opposite Chirrut. She looks up at him, eyes made grayer by the shadows beneath her eyes, by the too-pale blue of the sheets. He wants to look away.

“How are you feeling?” he asks, words stumbling out of their own accord like a stranger has spoken for him.

His voice is barely audible, even to him, but she must read his lips because she answers, “Okay. A little fuzzy.” She pauses and amends, “A lot fuzzy.”

Cassian swallows hard. 

“We should let you rest,” Chirrut says. Jyn’s eyes follow him as he stands. 

“It’s good to see you, little sister,” Baze says. A small smile brushes the corners of Jyn’s mouth upward.

“Bodhi, let’s get some dinner,” Chirrut says. 

Bodhi nods, his eyes flicking from Jyn to Cassian. “I’ll come back later, to see if you need anything.” Cassian isn’t sure which one of them he’s talking to. K follows them out, uncharacteristically silent.

Cassian studies the crossing pattern of stitches in the pillow. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you woke up,” he finally whispers.

“It’s okay.”

“No it’s not. I just, I didn’t know…” he stops then, because he isn’t sure what he didn’t know. A lot of things, he supposes.

“It’s alright. Cassian,” she says, reaching out to grip his wrist, “I’m okay.” He finally looks up at her and hopes he doesn’t look as pathetic as he feels. His shoulders are so tight they’re trembling. 

“I made sure I got this,” he says, digging the kyber crystal from his pocket. “I didn’t want it to get lost.” He twists his wrist in her grasp so he can take her hand and place the necklace in her palm.

“Thank you,” she says. The way she’s looking at him, he can’t meet her eyes. “Cassian, what’s wrong?”

He shakes his head. He takes a breath to speak, to assure her that he’s fine, but it catches in his throat. She notices. Of course she notices. She trails her fingers along his wrist in what he knows is supposed to be comfort. He flinches away.

“You should rest,” he says, echoing Chirrut’s earlier words.

He’s looking at the pillow, but he still sees the hurt flash across her face before it’s hidden beneath an impassivity he knows she’s faking.

“So should you,” she says, a little bit of a bite at the edges of the words.

He nods. “I’ll come see you in a little while.”

He’s not sure he will.

He feels her eyes on him as he leaves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know there's like.... a really long way to go before any sort of closure and only one chapter left... but we will get a little bit of resolution shortly, I promise.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so, so thankful to all of you who have stuck with me through this. I let this fic sit for over a month after it was finished and just kind of stared at it... But it remains the fic that I'm the proudest of, and definitely the piece which I delved the most deeply into. Cassian and Jyn are just such profound characters to write, and I hope I have more to come yet for this fandom.

Draven puts him back in the duty roster exactly when he said he would. Cassian reports for his shifts, does his work, and leaves. The meals he bothers to grab he takes in the mess when he knows it will be nearly empty. He avoids his team.

K comes and goes, but doesn’t try to pressure him into speaking. Cassian wonders if Jyn has told him not to.

Cassian lets a week pass. And then another.

He barely notices.

He reports for his shift. 

He does his work.

And then he leaves.

Today is no different. It was dark in the section of intelligence he’s been working in; his eyes strain in the light of the hallway. He’s not sure what time it is, and if he’s honest with himself, which he’s trying not to be, he’s not entirely sure what day it is either. He’s tired and he’s cold and the only thing he wants right now is to collapse into his bed. He almost makes it to his quarters.

Then he sees Jyn.

She’s stalking towards him, her hands in her pockets, shoulders hunched, pants rumpled around her ankles, feet stuffed hastily in her boots. She’s glaring at him.

He stops, because there’s no avoiding her.

She stops too, glaring at him for a moment longer before speaking. “You look awful,” she finally says.

He blinks, because it’s tactless and rude and so like her, but it wasn’t what he expected at all. “What?”

“You look terrible,” she says, as if he hadn’t heard her. “When was the last time you slept?”

“I--” He looks at her a little more closely. There’s anger in the corner of her eyes, in the bow of her lips. “Why are you here? You should still be in the medbay.”

The lines of anger on her face deepen despite obvious effort toward hiding it. “Suddenly you care?”

“What?” He spits the word.

“I was under the impression that you had better things to do than visit me,” she says icily. She jerks her chin down the hallway. “I was on my way to see Bodhi.”

“You’re lying,” he says, because he can tell she is, and knows as soon as it’s left his mouth that he absolutely should not have said it.

Jyn’s eyebrows raise in surprise. “Are you fucking serious?”

“I’m sorry, Jyn, I--” he shakes his head. His thoughts are hazy with exhaustion and he knows he’s not thinking clearly.

“You what.”

A voice cuts through their argument. “Look, kids, everyone has better things to do than listen to the two of you argue.”

Jyn crosses her arms and turns to face Han. Cassian notices that she doesn’t square her shoulders like she normally would, but she still lifts her chin in defiance. “That’s rich, coming from you. I’m sure everyone on this base has had plenty of experience ignoring arguments, what with you and the princess yelling at each other at least twice a day.”

“Listen,” he starts. “All I’m trying to say--”

Jyn interrupts. “Get the fuck away from me.” She turns her glare on Cassian again. “Both of you.”

She turns back the way she’d come. Han meets Cassian’s eyes and jerks his head towards Jyn. Cassian follows her without hesitation, making a mental note to thank Han later, despite how insufferable he can be, because he knows exactly the opportunity he’s set up for him.

“Jyn, wait!” She doesn’t stop. “Wait!”

She turns to face him in the deserted hallway. “I did! I did wait! I waited for you, and you never came. I thought.... I thought something had _happened_ … and then Baze told me that you were okay, that you were back on the duty roster, that you were working… I thought you’d come, Cassian, and you _didn’t_.” Her voice breaks, and so does his resolve.

“I’m not okay,” he says, whispered into the chill air. He can’t look at her. “I’m not. I haven’t been.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. His eyes are burning. “I don’t know… What if…” He can’t finish either thought. “I thought I was going to watch you die,” he whispers.

“You didn’t.” The words are short, almost savage in the raw emotion of her voice.

“I know. I know. But what if I did? What if you had? What would I do?” 

“What do you mean? You’re a survivor, Cassian. You’d have been okay.” Anything would be easier than this, anything, even her throwing his own selfishness back in his face.

“ _Would I_?” His hands are shaking. He’s tired of this pressure in his chest, this difficulty in breathing, this silence that rings through his mind between every thought, self-enforced silence that’s the product of keeping his thoughts so tightly controlled for the past few weeks. “You put me back together after Scarif,” he whispers. She opens her mouth but he interupts before she can make a sound. “Don’t say you didn’t. Don’t pretend that I did it myself because we both know that’s a lie, and you’re not the liar here.”

“Cass--”

“I told you I had your back,” he snaps. “I let-- I let them torture you, I let them make you suffer, and _I made you suffer_. I almost lost you because I didn’t know what to do and I waited and I let that happen!”

“What else were you supposed to do?” Her words are short and sharp and halfway to a shout.

“I don’t know, Jyn, anything! I should have thought of something, found a way out, anything. We never should have gotten caught in the first place.”

“That wasn’t your fault and you know it.”

“I took too long to get us out and you almost died because of it!” He doesn’t realize he’s shouting until she takes a step forward, confronting him instead of stepping away, even though he knows every instinct in her is telling her to run.

“You got us out alive!” she shouts back. “Both of us. I don’t really care what half-bit torture methods those nerf-fuckers used; I’ve had worse, and so have you. What I’ve never, _never_ had before was someone who was there, who gave enough of a shit about me to get me out alive when I couldn’t do it myself.”

Their argument dissolves into a silence underscored by the humming of the base generators, the slight staticky fizz of the lighting.

He wants to reach out for her, but he’s frozen in place and she’s more than an arm’s length away. 

She shivers, just barely, and then he’s moving, shrugging out of his coat in a single motion and wrapping it around her shoulders, pulling it closed around her. She bites her lip and his mouth goes a little dry. He wants to hate that she can do that to him without even meaning to, but he doesn’t. Somehow, he never has.

“What would I do, Jyn? Without you?” His hands don’t leave the lapels of his jacket.

“I hope neither of us ever have to find out,” she says, a little shyly, without looking at him, and it takes a moment of silence for the implications of that statement to sink in for him.

“I’ve been on my own for so long,” he says slowly. “I’ve had K for a long time, but he’s never really run ops with me quite like that before. He’s always been my back-up, not my partner when things are tough. He’s too noticeable.” She nods, because she knows this already. “I’ve never had a team until recently, and I’ve never had a partner. You’re an asset; you’re a strength, to the team, to the rebellion, to _me_. But Jyn, you’re my weakness. They used you-- they used you against me and they didn’t even think I actually knew you. What would they do if they did know? If they knew how much you really meant to me, if--” The words catch in his throat and suddenly he can’t speak.

He looks down at her boots, at her pants caught around the tops, at the laces loose and trailing just barely on the floor.

He knows now, after everything is said and done, that they escaped with their identities intact. Jyn had erased all of the files on the prisoners; Intelligence has so far not uncovered any traces of data sent out from the ship while they were onboard, and not for lack of trying.

He knows now, after everything is said and done, that he absolutely did not escape unscathed. Jyn was the one injured, but he would do anything to have taken that hurt for her. He knows that the Imperials weren’t using Jyn Erso against Cassian Andor, but using Herra Fayan against Dessen Rix was just as effective. He wonders, he really wonders, if he would have broken or if he would have watched her die. If Laren had been a deliberate agent of the Imperials instead of a boy thrown into a terrible situation and trying to help as best he could, Cassian thinks that he may have actually given himself away eventually, intentionally or unintentionally. As it was, he’d given away to Laren the fact that they were behind the bombings, and Laren had assumed that they were with the rebellion, though Cassian had never confirmed it. 

If Laren had been a true Imperial, if they had tortured Jyn in front of him with a greater sense of intentionality than merely letting her suffer, Cassian thinks he would have broken.

Jyn’s hands are on his face, her thumbs tracing below his eyes. His face is hot.

“It’s okay, Cassian. It’s alright.”

“I almost got you killed,” he says. “I got that poor boy killed.”

“We’re okay.” She wraps her arms around his waist, resting her head against his chest. He buries his face in her neck and knows she can feel the heat of his tears. It’s the most physical contact they’ve ever showed in public, the most weakness they’ve ever exposed. Deserted hallway or no, he doesn’t care, not today, not after everything. He holds her as if she’s made of ice, thin and fragile, carefully avoiding her injuries. “He wasn’t innocent,” she says, very softly. “He was kind, but he wasn’t innocent. He deserved better, but there was nothing you could’ve done. You took a calculated risk. Good people die young.” He nods. Her words dissolve into the chill of the hallway. “I wouldn’t be so sure he’s gone, though,” she says. “He was still breathing when we left. They still could’ve saved him.”

“You think so?”

“Maybe. There’s always hope, Cassian. You taught me that.”

He smiles despite himself, just slightly, that clinging sense of despair he’s felt for weeks now lifting just a little bit, just enough for him to draw another breath. “We’ll never know.”

“No. But there’s a sort of perpetual hope in that, isn’t there.”

He hums an agreement that fractures a little in the middle, breathing through the pressure that statement creates in his chest because purposely not knowing is exactly what he’d considered doing. She doesn’t speak. She just holds him. For a moment he fears she knows that, knows what he almost did, but as he buries his face in her neck, as she lets him fold himself around her, he knows that he could never hide that from her. She knows him too well, already, because time has never flowed quite right around them; she knows all of him, all the things he never wanted anyone to see laid bare under her gaze. 

“Do you have to go back to the medbay?” he asks when he can breathe again.

She pulls away from him and gives him a hard look. “I’m not going back.”

“Should you?”

“I won’t.”

He frowns, but her tone leaves no room for argument. She pulls his coat a little tighter around herself and follows him down the hallway to his quarters.

She hangs the coat on the peg by the door. They line their boots up by the bed.

She settles on the edge of the mattress, only the toes of her socks brushing the duracrete floor. Cassian studies her for a moment in profile, and though he knows she’s aware of his gaze she doesn’t move. She looks young, he thinks, all of the stress heavy on her shoulders, the weight of everything that’s happened soaking through her mask and sloughing it away like sodden fabric. She looks young and fragile and nothing at all in this moment like the supernova he knows she is.

He reaches out, drawing a knuckle along the line of her jaw.

He leans toward her, to take her in his arms, but she presses a palm to his chest. He stills and waits for her to speak.

Silence is thick between them like blood, like her blood on his hands. It’s heavy and damp like fog curling in the cold air. Cassian knows words are something they sacrifice. Sometimes there are no words in any language to express the emotion they bear; sometimes those emotions are unyielding and cruel like planetary gravity on a crippled ship and Cassian is glad he doesn’t know how to express what he feels.

“I wish I could’ve saved those people,” Jyn finally says, and suddenly it’s out in the open between them, raw and exposed.

Cassian should’ve known to expect this, known that she would share his guilt.

“We couldn’t,” he says, and it’s a reflexive answer, a defense. It’s hypocrisy, from both of them, to offer comfort while arguing against guilt and yet still suffer from it themselves, but there’s no avoiding it. Cassian knows Draven thinks it’s emotional codependency, but he also knows it’s more complicated than that.

“I know,” she says.

“Isn’t it better that someone survives, rather than no one?”

“Yes,” she says. She’d said there was hope for Laren, before, and on the ship she’d said there was a chance the Imperials would release the prisoners. That perpetual hope, though, rooted in never knowing the outcome still flowers with a sour scent, the lingering possibility that things had turned out terribly wrong. She looks up at him, guilt and grief and sadness written in every curve and shadow of her face. “But sometimes I wish we didn’t.”

He tucks her hair behind her ear and she lets him draw her into a hug. He shuts his eyes because sometimes, like a star, it’s easiest not to look at her. “I know, _mi amor_.” She holds him a little tighter and he knows she understands. She understands that he knows she feels this way. She understands that he knows that feeling intimately, because he feels it too. He thinks she understands what those words mean, even if she can’t translate them, because there are some things that are too profound for words, for any language, and this emotion is too great for Cassian to catch it in his hands and make it fit neatly within tiny, finite little syllables. Even so, he tries, just to make her understand. 

He presses his lips to her temple and he can feel exhaustion written in every line of her body.

He settles into the bed, pulling the blankets up between his back and the wall. She settles against his chest, jerking half the pillow toward herself. 

She tangles their legs as he wraps an arm around her, holding her as closely as he can. He presses his lips to her forehead. Every one of his breaths sounds too loud in the silence. “Don’t ever leave me,” he whispers.

“Only if you never leave me,” she says. Part of him wants to laugh, because she’s the best challenge he’s ever had, and part of him wants to cry, because this is a bargain he’s buying with their lives.

“Deal.” In the dark and the silence, Cassian listens to the steady sounds of her breaths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this last chapter was a lot, and I know that it doesn't completely resolve. I generally think writers should just sort of "stay out of it" and let their work speak for itself, but I will say, though it goes without saying, that I genuinely think this is along the lines of how this would've went for our dear characters. There's so much weight and so much trauma here that I think the tension and anger would in large part have just shattered when confronted. That's not to say there wouldn't have been a LOT more to unpack... And we might be seeing some of it soon. ;) (Also, my stories _Sound and Silence_ and _Firelight_ follow this, retroactively continuing the whole kyber crystal thing, so, like, maybe check those out if that's your thing, because it sure as hell is mine.)
> 
> Thank you again to all who read and reviewed-- you all make the hell that writing puts us through absolutely and entirely worth it.


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